This problem has been plaguing mutt 1.5.x users everywhere, and I haven't found a clear fix to this on the web. Using 1.4.x works fine, but when you upgrade, you get that message stating that the mailbox is readonly.

The problem is with the dotlock... it's not getting permission to save it to the mail directly. As soon as it can't create a dotlock, mutt sets the mailbox as readonly. The cause is due to the permissions being set upon installation. The file mutt_dotlock should look like this:

  ls -l mutt_dotlock
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root  mail   558909 Mar  4 10:34 mutt_dotlock

Note that it's setgid mail. That is, it should be. By default on a lot of systems, it's being installed as the group root, which won't work.

For quick and dirty bandwidth monitoring, combining iptraf with rrdtool seems to work really well. this tutorial describes exactly how to get it set up with web based graphs which can monitor per port traffic. It took less than 15 minutes to get that working.

I never realized how easy it is to set up an IRC server until I tried it for the CPLUG and HPM box. It wasn't that much harder to add an SSL option using SSL Wrap. Of course, some people can't get to it due to port restrictions, so it's also got the web interface using CGIIRC. Many CPLUG users have been getting less work done lately :-)

Nate's been pondering an IRC to Email bot. A great Perl project.