Jessica Von Petzold was a woman in desperate peril. Pursued by the minions of her evil husband the Baron, she rode her white stallion furiously into the night, her enormous bosom heaving in fright. Oh how they had laughed when she built the stables on the third floor of the Union Square office building from which she had built up her lingerie business into an international e-tailer that rivaled Amazon.com. But dotcom money was plentiful in those days and tonight her investment was paying off. Onward she rode, onward, headless of wind, rain, and the 45 minute delay at the Holland Tunnel. Onward to the only man who could save her now.
Flint Hannigan stood in the doorway and gazed out at the rising sun. It was time to attend to his morning wood. Flint always got wood in the morning. With no sound but the occasional grunt, Flint got to work. Within half an hour the job was done. Flint put down the axe next to the pile of split logs and took of his shirt. A figure approaching over the horizon had piqued his interest. As Jessica spied Flint in the distance, his chiseled pectorals faintly glistening with sweat, she felt a giddy sense of elation. A feel she had not felt since the first time she reached the 8th level in JetPac. At last the tide was turning in her favor! Her enormous bosom, heaved with delight. But her musings had made her careless and her horse stumbled sending her flying -- into the arms of Flint. She managed to stammer, "Flint, oh Flint...MX records...I must...virtual domain...," then such concentrated masculinity became too much to bear and she fainted. Jessica did not awake till that evening. She found herself in a Victorian four-poster bed. She pulled back the satin sheets and sat up to see the shadowy form of Flint standing above her. As her eyes adjusted to the gloom she gasped in astonishment. "My God Flint! That thing is huge!" Flint turned on the antique Tiffany lamp by the bedside and placed the Thinkpad upon her lap. "Yes my lady. I've been meaning to by a Visor but I really like the keyboard on this. Look I've installed Linux on it. Alan Cox says the next stable kernal will even include driver support for the winmodem." The mention of Linux jarringly reminded Jessica of her mission and its' urgency. "Oh Flint you've got to help. My husband the Baron wants to kill me. All I did was to suggest we could achieve a better TCO if we replaced our Windows 2000 based desktops with Linux and maybe a Sparc for backend processing and then he flew into a murderous rage. His cronies have comandeered our servers and if my marketing department can't get email by tomorrow, we're doomed. Doomed I tell you!" her body shaking like the fan on an overclocked athlon, she began sobbing into his broad, guy-who-delivers-water-for-the-watercooler-like shoulder. Flint gazed upon her in silence. Becoming aware of his silence Jessica looked up into his somber grey eyes, her enormous bosom heaving with concern. "Oh Flint", she said, "why won't you say something?" Flint cleared his throat, said "my lady", and stopped again. "Oh Flint, do you still hold the past against me? I know I gave you some bad advice but I...I was young and foolish. The Unix market was deeply fragmented and Visual Basic promised to be an innovative new paradigm. But know this Flint Hannigan, I only wanted the best for you. I let the Baron seduce me with his sexy teutonic accent and complete collection of Lego Mindstorms but I see now that you are the only man I love. The only man I ever loved." "My lady," Flint said again, even more hesitantly than before. "Oh Flint", Jessica exclaimed sharply, "Forget all these false veneers that hide your true feelings, and strip your soul down to the primeval urges that bind a man and a woman and a buggy mail transport." At that, a fire began to blaze in Flint Hannigans eyes, "I'll do it!" he said and they kissed a smouldering, passionate kiss until 7pm when Futurama comes on, followed by King Of The Hill, and The Simpsons. 8:30pm found them in Flint Hannigans' basement. Lit by the eerie glow of two 21" flat-screen monitors (the second for xinerama when the nVidia drivers get around to supporting it.) they sat in the cola-stained swivel-chairs Flint had rescued from the dumpster of a former employer. "Now Jessica", he said, "Do you have access to your primary DNS server?" "Yes," she replied. "Good. We are going to change the MX record so it points to my server. What is your domain?" "intl-lingerie.com." "Then on a Debian box, you'll find the zone file for it in /etc/bind. Probably in db.intl-lingerie.com though the administrator can change that. Check in /etc/bind/named.conf to be sure." "Ok, got it." "Jessica, I've always admired your vi skills, why don't you edit the file?" Blushing crimson, Jessica did just that. "Ok, now run /etc/init.d/bind reload and the DNS update will take effect. It could take upto a couple of days to fully propogate throughout the internet though. now we add some users with /usr/sbin/useradd. If we just want them to receive mail and not login, we can set their shell to /bin/false. For remote access they can use an IMAP client. For the IMAP server I recommend the uw-imapd-ssl package. I've heard the maintainer is very diligent and responsive, not to mention the only man on earth even more handsome than me." "But Flint," said Jessica, "won't their email addresses be @hannigan.org? How do we associate these user accounts with addresses @intl-lingerie.com?" "Excellent question my dear, the answer: we use sendmail's virtusertable feature. First check it is enabled by seeing that /etc/mail/sendmail.mc has a line like this: FEATURE(virtusertable)dnl if not then add it." "Ok, I've done that." "Then create a file called /etc/mail/virtuser table with mappings of addresses to local users like this: [EMAIL PROTECTED] jessica [EMAIL PROTECTED] alice [EMAIL PROTECTED] bob etc. It should work now. Try send an email to yourself and see." "Flint! It's not working" exclaimed Jessica, her enormous bosom heaving in puzzlement. "whoops, we forgot to regenerate the configuration" said Flint. "sendmail.mc is just a collection of M4 macros that expand into sendmail.cf. This is the real sendmail configuration file. and virtusertable has to be turned into a Berkely DBM database called virtusertable.db . run /usr/sbin/sendmailconfig and answer yes to the questions it asks you. Ok, now does it work?" "Yes Flint, Oh Flint you did it!" jubilantly they retired to the bedroom for a night of sensitive, tender, romantic, yet crazed monkey-like lovemaking. The next morning they awok to the martial blaring of trumpets, the loathsome face of the Baron staring at them from every monitor. "Flint Hannigan", he said or rather cackled, "It is I, Charles, Ze Barrron Von...hold on blue screen of death...just have to reboot...hold on it doesn't usually take that long...and...alright we're back. Ahem, Flint Hannigan, it is I, Charles, Ze Barrron Von Petzold. Surrrrrrender ze wench to me. Rrresistance is futile I haf ze serrrverrrs under lock und key. No mail will...what? You have rrrouted ze mail around me. Damn you Flint Hannigan! Damn you to Hell<click>" "I think that's the last we'll see of him," said Flint gravely. But Jessicas' mind was elsewhere. "Oh Flint will we ever be an item again?" she sighed, her enormous bosom heaving gratuitously. "I'm afraid not my darling. You use vi, I use pico. Society would never accept a passion such as ours. I'm still up for some of that crazed-monkey love though." "Oh Flint." THE END...OR IS IT? -- Jaldhar H. Vyas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>