Inconsistent duplicate attributeType: "mailHost"

This is due to a new misc.schema that is now default in Ubuntu Lucid at least (and maybe other distribution) and defines a mailhost attribute.

You'll encounter this error when trying to add another schema defining this same attribute. I have a mail.schema comming from Mandriva Directory Server, which tries to do so. And a small google reveals that qmail.schema has similar problem.

2 solutions:

• Either remove the attribute from your new schema by deleting the attribute entry in the schema file and remove any reference to mailhost anywhere it appears in the file. I wouldn't recommend this.
• Either remove the misc.schema from your ldap server. Cross fingers that it isn't used too much ;)

Et voilà !

And you've probably come to the fact that if Ctrl-R is working (and you use it every day), Ctrl-S doesn't seem to work and freezes the screen. So you've just learned not to use Ctrl-S.

readline based command-line program (as any unix shell) will answer to Ctrl-S if they receive the keystroke. The keystroke Ctrl-S actually does not reach readline because it's caught by the TTY driver. TTY driver will trigger a pause in the reception of characters upon Ctrl-S keystroke, and this is why the screen appears to freeze. You can unfreeze with Ctrl-Q.

This pausing mechanism is from old times when you could ask for other end to pause sending characters. This was meant to prevent character loss. With nowadays hardware, this is not useful anymore, and you can safely de-activate this obsolete feature to enable back Ctrl-S in your readline based command-line with:

stty stop ''

Note that you can put this in your ~/.bashrc if needed.

Hopefully, there's a lot of zealous people on the net that share my mental disorder. Thanks to them, let's see how I managed synchronization between Thunderbird/Lightning - Google Mail/Agenda - iPhone. It'll not cover Mail synchronization as this is a quite simple and common pattern.

This applies to any system (Linux, Windows, Macintosh) as Thunderbird and Google web services are OS agnostic.

Principle

Google Account will be our central exchange platform. So go get an account if you haven't one yet.

Thunderbird sync with Google

Contact synchronization

Install Zindus extension in Thunderbird. This extension manage synchronisation towards any number of Google or Zimbra accounts.

Configuration can be a bit tricky, in the extension configuration panel:

1. Enter your Google Account credentials, and check them with the test button.
2. Then you should check the advanced google settings to ask for XML output
3. Ask for your first synchronisation

Sanity check: Look at your Contact Book on Thunderbird before and after synchronization (same for GMail). If you feel like you should clean that mess, check my other blog post on cleaning contact list.

Calendars

Note that Agenda support in Thunderbird is brought by the Lightning extension. Which you should have installed prior to what's following.

Notice that Lightning and Google can be synchronized out-of-the box, no new extension here:

1. Get in your google account preferences and check your XML private address to the agenda you want to sync
2. Use this XML address as a New Network Agenda in Lightning

That's it.

Sain check: create a new dummy event in one end (Lightning or Google), and check it appears on the other end. Suppress it on the other end, and check that it disappeared from the first end.

iPhone sync with Google

Contact & Agenda

In Mail, Contact, Agendas settings, you'll have to Add an Exchange Account towards "m.google.com". Note that:

• email fields is not used, so set as you mind
• Exchange server might not appear first, so don't mind, iPhone will ask it after a first try to standard servers (I guess)
• do not set the Mail synchronization unless that is what you want to do.

This might delete previous contact. I didn't mind as my iPhone was empty.

Sanity check: You should look at your agenda and contacts, create an event and a contact, and check that in Google and Thunderbird all is well reported. (You might need to ask for synchronization in Zindus extension to get a quick change synchronized.)

That's all.

References

You should definitively check this reference with more details:

• Synchronisation du Calendrier et des Contacts sous Thunderbird - in french.