GAIM 0.11.0pre5 and Sendmail/DNS
Last evening I noticed that there was a new release of GAIM - the AIM/Yahoo/MSN instant messaging client that I run all the time. I downloaded it and patched the src/perl.c file to properly work with perl 5.005_03 on Solaris. You see, perl makes an assumption about the environment array - namely, that it is mutable. On Solaris/SPARC that is not the case, and moreover, there's no documentation/reason to believe that it should be. I've talked to the Perl folks, and they've patched their code but it's still in perl 5.005_03. So, I've got a work-around that I patch into GAIM (and other code that uses this same perl plug-in feature). Then I built GAIM.
What I found was that there was an error when I ran GAIM 0.11.0pre5:
Gdk-ERROR **: BadShmSeg (invalid shared segment parameter)
serial 61 error_code 131 request_code 131 minor_code 2
Gdk-ERROR **: BadShmSeg (invalid shared segment parameter)
serial 76 error_code 131 request_code 131 minor_code 2
that I traced down to a call to XLoadQueryFont() in the stack trace:
gdk_font_load()
gtk_style_new()
gtk_widget_get_default_style()
gtk_widget_peek_style()
gtk_widget_init()
gtk_type_new()
gtk_window_new()
When I stepped through the call to XLoadQueryFont() I could occaisionally get it to work - but when it did, I didn't get the proper icons on the buddy list for expanding and collapsing the groups in my buddy list. I reverted to gaim 0.11.0pre4, and everything is fine.
I've posted a message on the GAIM SourceForge page, and we'll see if anyone comes up with something. I have a feeling that it's got something to do with the more lax Linux/i86 architecture versus the SPARC/Solaris platform. I've run into this with perl, and I can easily imaging that the 0.11.0pre5 is doing something that's throwing off the subsequent call to XLoadQueryFont(). In any case, I'm back to 0.11.0pre4 and it's working very nicely. We'll see what happens when and if I get an answer from the GAIM folks.
Some days I hate DHCP and MediaOne. OK... it's not DHCP, it's just MediaOne's use of it. If I had a fixed IP address then I could possibly work up a few DNS records somewhere that would point to the machines. Why's this important? Well... without forward and reverse DNS entries sendmail won't really function. At least I've tried, and the version on Solaris 7 isn't being helpful. I went through this on my NeXTSTEP 3.3 machine and got it working but the version of sendmail is changed and the configuration changes used in the version I have on NeXTSTEP don't do what's necessary on Solaris. Not that this is that surprising, but it'd be nice if sendmail had a simple configuration file default to hand off to another SMTP server. I know I could figure it out, but it's not that important, but it is a pain.
I tried sparky, barney and mao - representing Solaris, Irix, and Linux, and on each I was unable to simply mail out of the box because of sendmail. Oh... I can do it with Netscape because it allows me to communicate directly with the SMTP server, and put in a login to that SMTP server, and while sendmail seems to allow the specification of a great number of things, these don't easily pop up to be configured.
I know that if I had proper DNS I'd be able to handle this because the default configuration of sendmail on Linux does this fine - I've got it working on another host. It's just MediaOne who isn't allowing us to register names. What a pain...
For now I'm stuck with making my own mail client and sticking with Netscape. Looking at those two opportunities, Netscape is best.
UPDATE: I found a site called easyDNS that does exactly what I need. For $55/yr I can get a domain name registered (through them) and have their DNS servers hold the DHCP addresses of my machines. There are little clients for Linux/Solaris/Windows that send any DHCP-related IP changes to their service so that their DNS is constantly being kept up to date. With this, I could easily get DNS for my machines and then sendmail would be working just fine. Certainly something to think about.