Using my Nokia N95 for fixing my MTA

Published at 2008-12-29T09:10:41+00:00; Updated at 2021-12-01

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                      Art by Joan Stark

The last week I was in Vidin, Bulgaria with no internet access and I had to fix my MTA (Postfix) at host.0.buetow.org which serves E-Mail for all my customers at P. B. Labs. Good, that I do not guarantee high availability on my web services (I've to do a full time job somewhere else too).

My first attempt to find an internet café, which was working during Christmastime, failed. However, I found with my N95 phone lots of free WLAN hotspots. The hotspots refused me logging into my server using SSH as I have configured a non-standard port for SSH for security reasons. Without knowing the costs, I used the GPRS internet access of my German phone provider (yes, I had to pay roaming fees).

=> Picture of a Nokia N95

With Putty for N95 and configuring Postfix with Vim and the T9 input mechanism, I managed to fix the problem. But it took half of an hour:

• First, getting a shell prompt
• Second, use the "tail" command to analyse the Postfix logs
• Third, use the "sed" command to fix a syntax error in the Postfix config
• Fourth, restart Postfix

It was a pain in the ass. My next mobile phone MUST have a full QWERTY keyboard. This would have made my life lots easier. :)

At the moment I am in Sofia, Bulgaria. Here I can use at least an unprotected WLAN hotspot which belongs to one of the neighbours which I don’t know in person, and it is not blocking any port at all :)

E-Mail your comments to paul@nospam.buetow.org :-)

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