Caching IMAP (06 Feb 2003)
As I'm sure some people have noticed (except those on RSS feeds) I've trimmed the header of the site on the advice of Etienne because the top post ended up too far down. Thanks Etienne.
The scripts which generate this site really need updating too. One feature I would like to add is the ability to view all the blog content relating to a topic. This requires that I go and tag all my past entries, but there aren't too many of those.
In other news, the local LUG held their InstallFest yesterday which, by all accounts, went pretty well. Debian (3.0 with some sid stuff like KDE3.1) was the default install, though some people opted for SuSE 8.1 instead. I think we only trashed one hard drive with Partition Magic.
Building on an idea from one the CSG people I've half implemented an IMAP server which does caching of an mbox. Email here is all mbox format for a number of hard-to-change reasons and the current uw-crap server parses the whole thing every time. By keeping a cache of the structure you can speed things up a lot as the mboxes are over NFS. Fast deleting is a pain, but doable.
However, IMAP is evil (as documented below) and I can't really be bothered to finish the protocol implementation. The interesting bits are done and I might put a POP interface on it and stick it on IV.
The server is built in Twisted Python which is a really nice framework. I'll write something about this soon. (the mbox hackery is a C module, however)
In the meantime, I'm looking at securing NFS.