[sork] vacation not working

[Eric Rostetter]

Quoting marc.bigler@day.com:

> I am using the latest vacation available on your ftp, that is vacation 2.0.

I assume (hope) it is the horde ftp site?

> I have corrected the two little errors with $mode and $mess variables
> manually. Well what I can tell you is that I did a vacation -i as the user
> which I used in horde for the tests and then it worked.

Okay, so the problem is the "null database" problem.

> But I don't want a
> user needing to open a shell on the mail server and do manually vacation -i

Of course not! :)

Okay, there are some choices:

1) If you are running Horde CVS HEAD version, you can upgrade to the 
vacation CVS HEAD version.  I assume you are not using Horde CVS, since you
downloaded the vacation tarball, so this is probably not an option.

2) Create valid files, store them somewhere, and modify the code to use them.
Steps follow:

* Login as a user, and do a 'vacation -i' to create valid database files.
* Copy the resulting database file(s) to a location where the web server
account can read them (make sure the permissions allow the web server user
to read them).
* Edit the vacation.php file, and replace any references to "/dev/null" 
with the path to this file instead.  So if you put the files in /var/file.db,
you would replace "/dev/null" with "/var/file.db" instead.  There should
be three references to /dev/null, though you may not need to change all
three, or then again maybe you will... ;)

That should fix the problem.  The next version of vacation will work around
this by supplying the valid files, and copying them, based on a configuration
setting.

-- 
Eric Rostetter
The Department of Physics
The University of Texas at Austin

"TAD (Technology Attachment Disorder) is an unshakable, impractical devotion
to a brand, platform, product line, or programming language. It's relatively
harmless among the rank and file, but when management is afflicted the damage
can be measured in dollars. It's also contagious -- someone with sufficient
political clout can infect an entire organization."

--"Enterprise Strategies" columnist Tom Yager.