Ultimate mail client - Mutt

June 25th, 2009

I am sure every one of us must have been struggled to manage their growing mailbox. As your mailbox size starts growing, frequency of mail client crashing increases making you handicap. I spent early years of my career as desktop engineer, and spent significant amount of time trying to recover people mailbox from Outlook crash.

 Then I tried Thunderbird, the open source mail client from Mozilla foundation, which is more stable and does not crash as frequently as MS Outlook. But as my daily mail volume increased significantly (2000-3000 mails per day) Thunderbird started giving trouble. Every Monday morning I had to wait for at least an hour on weekend to open Thunderbird. 

Then I saw some of my team mates using Mutt. Earlier I had seen my manager in Red Hat, using Mutt for managing his mails, but never tried it. I decided to give it a try, and got sample conf files from one of my team mate. It took some time for me to understand it and configure it properly.

Initially I took time to basic things like composing, replying to mails etc. But once it was set properly I need not to touch Mutt conf files till date, though I changed my system lot of times.

Now I don’t have to worry of increased mail volume and number of unread mails in my mailbox.

Mutt can open any mailbox having thousands of mails within seconds. Mutt is ultimate mail client, though it’s a text based mail client it is the best compared to any other crappy mail clients like MS Outlook.

If you are struggling to manage your mails be it at work or home, Mutt is the solution for you.

Mutt is a feature-rich, lightweight, text-based e-mail client. Yes, it’s text-based.The text-based display is a feature, providing a customizable, concise viewport. The Mutt e-mail client will play nicely with remote IMAP, POP3 and SMTP servers. SSL connections also are supported. Whatever features Mutt does not provide other tools, such as address books, Web browsers, document viewers and more, can be leveraged to enhance Mutt’s innate abilities.

Mutt is faster, more customizable and less resource-intensive. Read the rest of this entry »

VDE - Virtual Network for Virtual Machines

June 25th, 2009

Currently I am exploring a open source application called VDE for creating virtual network on host machines to connect Virtual machines. If you have to access virtual machines from host either you have to use bridge or use tap interface. Using VDE ( Virtually Distributed Ethernet) you can connect as all those virtual machines running on your system to a virtual switch.

Imagine a virtual switch where you can connect any virtual guest as if you are connecting a physical machine to a physical switch.

With VDE you get a virtual swtich along with a console. You can login to VDE switch and  configure particular ports.

Installing VDE

VDE is packaged for Ubuntu and Debian, but currently it is not included in Fedora or RHEL. I have created its rpm for Fedora 10. I will soon create its rpm for other architechture and put a request to add that package in Fedora repo.  Currently for Fedora users needs to download the source  and compile it. You can get VDE source code from http://sourceforge.net/projects/vde/ .

Compiling VDE:

 Extract vde source a directory, become root and go to source directory. In source directory type

# ./configue

# make

# make install

You will have vde installed and command like vde_switch available to you.

Two virtual machines connected by a VDE switch:

Step 1: start the switch Each switch has a directory where it keeps all its temporary files. This directory is also used as the name of the switch.

$ vde_switch -s /tmp/switch1

This switch runs as a foreground process, so the shell prompt will not be returned. If you type Enter you’ll have the prompt of the configuration interface of the switch itself. Type help if you want to see the command list and syntax. Read the rest of this entry »