Red Hat Linux 7.3 IMP and HORDE configuration

Kurt Seifried, [email protected]

This has got to be the worst all around configuration hassle I have had in ages. I wanted to install and get webmail working. So I install horde and imp, and blam, tons of problems.

Getting Horde and IMP to install

They install no problem, but then as soon as I tried to access it I started getting weird errors, path locations were screwed up, files were missing, etc. The first problem is that /etc/httpd/conf/horde.conf has:

    <IfModule mod_php4.c>
        php_value include_path "/usr/share/php:."
    </IfModule>

Which is fine, except horde installs those files into /usr/share/pear/. The quick solution is to simply link it:

# cd /usr/share
# ln -s /usr/share/pear/ php

But things were still broken, login.php was trying to exist in the web root, so I started by editing paths, but then decided to compile horde and imp from source rpm's and install them and see what happens:

rpm -Uvh ftp://ftp.horde.org/pub/SRPMS/rh7/horde-2.0-1.src.rpm
rpm -Uvh ftp://ftp.horde.org/pub/SRPMS/rh7/imp-3.0-1.src.rpm
cd /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/
rpm -ba horde
rpm -ba imp
cd /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/noarch
rpm -Uvh horde-2.0-1.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh imp-3.0-1.noarch.rpm

This seems to work a lot better and all the problems appear to have disagreed.

Logging into IMP

So, it's all setup right? Wrong. I tried to access it and could not log in. If you're like me you're just using IMP you can ignore most of the files. You will need to uncomment the lines for imp in horde/config/registry.php of course but beyond that you don't need to do much. This is what I have in my horde/imp/config/servers.php file:

$servers['imap'] = array(
    'name' => 'IMAP Server',
    'server' => 'localhost',
    'protocol' => 'imap/ssl/novalidate-cert',
    'port' => 993,
    'folders' => 'mail/',
    'namespace' => '',
    'maildomain' => 'seifried.org',
    'realm' => 'seifried.org',
    'preferred' => ''
);

I use an SSL wrapped IMAP server. the "novalidate-cert" is critical, unless you have a signed cert with the root certificate properly installed IMP will fail to work correctly. If you do not have an SSL wrapped IMAP server IMP will fail to login with little or no error information. This happened to me at first, so I can a packet sniffer. Aha, "STARTTLS", it talks SSL by default, you must tell it explicitly not to talk ssl. If this is the case use the following line:

''protocol' => 'imap/notls',

This will allow you to use a normal non SSL capable IMAP server.

So finally I could log into IMP and read my email, life was complete. Or was it?

Arghh, I can't sendmail email with IMP on Red Hat 7.3

Turns out Red Hat did learn something from the remotely exploitable PHP bugs in early 2002. They disabled file uploads in PHP by default. Of course IMP does not create any sort of useful error message, and Apache doesn't seem to either. You must enable file uploads for PHP if you want to compose and send email! To do this edit /etc/php.ini:

; Whether to allow HTTP file uploads.
file_uploads = Off

Must be changed to:

; Whether to allow HTTP file uploads.
file_uploads = On

At this point you should restart httpd, and IMP should work, hopefully. Maybe. Kind of.

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Last updated 13/6/2002