Mutt account passwords

First, to give credit where it’s due, I started here. That said, here’s how I store and access account passwords in mutt on Linux.

## -- Passwords: encrypted by gpg --------------------------------------------------------------

source “/bin/gpg -d ~/.keychain/mutt.password.neopost.gpg 2>/dev/null |”

The source line in gpg tells mutt to decrypt a file at startup. The file .keychain/mutt… contains two mutt configuration lines:

set imap_pass = "<my_email_password>"
set smtp_pass = "<my_email_password>"

I created it as follows:

$ cat <<EOF | gpg -r <my_gpg_id> ~/.keychain/mutt.password.neopost.gpg
set imap_pass = "<my_email_password>"
set smtp_pass = "<my_email_password>"
EOF
$

Gpg knows how to decrypt this file and retrieve the plain text configuration. Note well that I used a “Here” document to create the file. This keeps mail password out of the filesystem. Simple stuff, at mutt startup the first time I use it, gpg-agent asks for my gpg key and unlocks the configuration snippet.

FreeBSD NIS server + Linux NIS client

Today I installed Fedora on my Desktop machine and tried to get it to talk to my NIS/NFS Server. I’ve run a NIS/NFS for a long while. It saves me my hair. But it’s always been FreeBSD on both sides. That’s easy to do. The FreeBSD handbook explains it quite well. I’ve been dipping my toe into the Linux waters alot lately and I figured that the next thing to put together was a Linux Client for my NIS/NFS server. The NFS part is easy. I used the automounter (amd) and the configuration is the same for both Linux and FreeBSD but NIS is another story. For my setup FreeBSS NIS server, Linux NIS client you need this patch to thefile: /var/yp/Makefile.dist on your server. Rebuild the maps and make sure that you have the automounter working and you should be good to go.