The hay feeders have been a big success. In normal winter weather (say low of 8°F, high of 18°F), we’ve pretty well stabilized at two bales a day. Miguel’s crew clean out their feeder every day with the extra to Leon and Buster, and the other two pens each eat one in two days.
This is at least half a bale better than before and the critters are better fed. There’s no baaing from them until they hear the grain rattle. They eat more in cold weather of course, the girls will soon be eating for two, which may become an issue, but right now it’s roughly a fleece a month of our hay bill.
I wish I could say the same about sendmail. Lisa slept in this morning and I decided it was time to make outgoing mail work from mackhillfarm and therichards.org. It was far easier than the first time I did it, because TLS now ‘just works’ and all SASL needs is a self-signed certificate, which procedure has also been streamlined. However sendmail itself seems irretriviably stuck in the 1980s. I deliberately chose to stick with sendmail because it’s a remote server.
Two hours of googling and fiddling later, it is now working. Yep, I forgot to enable sendmail to listen on non loopback ports. Why did I forget? Because in non TLS mode, it challenged for credentials which, it then denied. When I turned on TLS, it refused all connections, including incoming mail. So, of course I thought the issue was in the smtp-auth stuff.
I can understand why I’d need to change that setting for relaying, but I still have no clue why it should have to change to accept incoming mail. (If anything, it should not have been accepting mail in the first place — that’s what Apache would have done when configured to only listen on loopback, and that’s what makes sense to me.)
Rightness was restored to the universe however — when Lisa came up, I got to fight with Outlook. It’s settings make no sense either, whilst Evolution and Thunderbird had nice little ‘requires TLS’ and “Authentication method’ dropdowns that just worked.