Thursday, December 12, 2019

Both the Belgian and Estonian VAT declarations have a double field for the “final result”, i.e. the sum of all amounts to pay or to receive. I guess that they want to have a clear visual difference between a negative and a positive results. Understandable.

TIL : But in Lino we are not going to waste two separate database fields for this. It’s too easy to add this condition in the template for the printable or the XML file. A positive number means “positive” for the VAT office because they will get money from us. When using lino_xl.lib.bevats you will never ask to return VAT, so the number in that field will always be positive.

Learning about mail servers

I am manually checking the /etc/postfix/main.cf file on SR and LF.

  • mydomain was wrong. It was set to “mail.lino-framework.org” but must be “lino-framework.org”.

  • mydestination had duplicate entries.

  • I removed “compatibility_level=2”

  • mydestination = $myhostname localhost.$mydomain localhost $mydomain

    Until now this was repeated manually instead of using the variables, and it had commas as separators. EDIT: seems that the commas come from the default installation. That’s different from the docs, but I guess postfix ignores them.

Here are now our standard config settings:

myhostname = mail.example.com
myorigin = /etc/mailname
mydestination = $myhostname localhost.$mydomain localhost $mydomain
relayhost =
mynetworks = 127.0.0.0/8 [::ffff:127.0.0.0]/104 [::1]/128
mynetworks_style = host
relay_domains =
inet_interfaces = all

Here is what status should say:

$ sudo service postfix status
● postfix.service - Postfix Mail Transport Agent
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/postfix.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (exited) since Thu 2019-12-12 12:01:59 UTC; 7s ago
  Process: 2262 ExecStart=/bin/true (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
 Main PID: 2262 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)

Dec 12 12:01:59 my-host-name systemd[1]: Starting Postfix Mail Transport Agent...
Dec 12 12:01:59 my-host-name systemd[1]: Started Postfix Mail Transport Agent.