Linux

Today I found myself needing to copy a very large number of files from one server to another. My standard tool for these things is usually scp, but in this case it didn't work due to the fact that i needed to copy a large subset of files within a directory. In other words, I didn't want to copy server:directory – but server:directory/*pattern*. This is definitely possible with scp, but because *pattern* returned so many files in this case, I recieved the error message Argument list too long.

I found a handy solution for this, but first let's take a look at the reason behind this error message.

So I decided I would give up shared hosting for good and instead run a VPS based Linux instance with Plesk to help me setup web sites and mail accounts for a few of my domains. The license fee seemed to be well worth the money. Plesk brings a whole lot of power into one comprehensive web interface which saves me huge amounts of time and trouble compared to doing everything manually.

But I was rather disappointed when I realized that such a fundamental puzzle piece as a spam filter wasn't included in my license. Here's why I think that sucks and how I worked around the problem – twice.

This is a description of how to set up a Debian box to serve as a multi-domain mail server, with SMTP (authenication available), POP3, webmail and mailing lists.