David Chiu

Tonight I realized that the upgrade I did from MovableType 3 to MovableType 4 broke any and all links to my old articles once I had rebuilt my blog. The problem lies in the configuration option named “Basename Length” under Preferences->Blog Settings->Entries in MT4. The default value in MT4 is 30, whereas the default setting in MT3 was 15. Now I thought I could easily fix this by changing the value to 15 in MT4 and republishing my site, but that didn’t work. So instead I wrote this little PHP script to make copies of all my old archives articles and truncate the filenames to 15 characters. Now thinking about it, what I should have done - instead of making copies of the files, is create files with truncated filenames but that contain a PHP Header() directive that points at the current article with the 30 character filename. Anyway, here’s the script I wrote. Maybe it will help someone else. Be sure to CHMOD -R a+w archives/* before you run the script so that the script has permissions to create the new files. Then make sure you put the permissions back to what they should be when you’re done.

<?php

function changeext($directory, $verbose = false) {
$num = 0;
if($curdir = opendir($directory)) {
while($file = readdir($curdir)) {
if($file != '.' && $file != '..') {

$srcfile = $directory . '/' . $file;
$string  = "$file";
$str     = strlen($ext1);
$str++;
$newfile = substr($string, 0, 15);
$newfile = $newfile.'.php';
$dstfile = $directory . '/' . $newfile;

if (eregi("\.php",$file)&&(strlen($file)>19)) {
($srcfile, $dstfile);
//echo "copy $srcfile, $dstfile";
}

if(is_dir($srcfile)) {
$num += changeext($srcfile, $verbose);
}
}
}
closedir($curdir);
}
return $num;
}

changeext('archives',  'false');

?>

I recently noticed that I wasn’t receiving any comment email notifications from Movable Type so I decided to dive into the system to figure out what was going wrong. Running mt-check.cgi reported back that sendmail was installed so I thought it might be a permissions issue between the the apache user process and sendmail. I typed in ’sendmail’ at the prompt and received back a message talking about “Exim“. Well, I’m not a Linux guru, but I do know that Sendmail!=Exim. So I turned to google to tell me what the heck Exim is and how do I figure out what’s going wrong. Google pointed me to the exim log file on the system which I watched as I sent test emails from Movable Type. The exim.log showed that it could not resolve the email addresses and was failing. A second thing I noticed was the ton of spam it was successfully blocking. So I went back to google to find out more info. I tried searching on keywords “exim movabletype”, “exim configuration” and couldn’t find anything useful. Then after staring at the exim.conf file for 10min, the lines “domainlist local_domains=” hit me. Google had told me that Exim was used for transferring and relaying local mail. My mail is being hosted at google through google apps. So I did a new google search for “exim google apps“. That search gave up a clue that got me one step further: If you are using a linux server, don’t forget to edit the /etc/remotedomains file to delete your domain. Well after poking around the file system I knew that I didn’t have a “remotedomains” file, but it did sound very similar to my “/etc/virtual/domains” file mentioned in my exim.conf.  So I googled “/etc/virtual/domains“. And saw my final clue titled: Disable SMTP to certain local domains? That article did not have the exact answer but gave me enough information for me to solve the problem. To disable SMTP/mail service for specific domains just copy “/etc/virtual/domains” to some other file such as “/etc/virtual/domains_with_smtp”, edit the file and delete all the domains which use google mail, then point exim.conf “domainlist local_domains=” and “domainlist relay_domains=” to use this new file.

Voila! Email notifications now work!