It’s almost Christmas and I’m off to celebrate with the family and to take a few days of to visit and enjoy London during the days between Christmas and New Years eve. So don’t expect much posting between now and the first of January.
I would like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I hope you’ll find a Mac mini under the tree if you haven’t got one yet and find some fun use for it. (more…)
This is the final page I needed to write down to configure the mail-server and get a secure enough setup to my liking. The final page is like the last page I added an optional extra to get secure access to the mail folders located on the server. It’s a description of how to configure IMAP to use SSL and/or TLS so that an encrypted communication channel will be setup before any passwords or e-mails are send over the internet. Which will make (more…)
Finally had some time to write down the steps it takes to configure Postfix to use SSL for SMTP also known as TLS. I’ll tell you how to create a certificate instead of buying an expensive one and how to confingure it all on this page. This step isn’t required to get the Postfix mail server in working order but it will allow you to securely authenticate your users with a clear password. (more…)
This was bound to happen sooner or later, this version still has some errors. I found out that while getting the TLS support in Postfix configured that I forgot to include the option for TLS during compilation. which means that TLS support wasn’t even included in the executable. I had to include the option ‘-DUSE_TLS’ during the makefile configuration. It is now included in the documentation. (more…)
First I would like to thank everybody who sent emails and posted comments on possible errors and omissions in the documentation. Special thanks go to Tim who ran into some issues because of the errors in the documentation and while helping him trying to solve the problems he had, I made corrrections to the documentation. (more…)
Finally, I’ve got all steps document into getting everything compiled, installed and configured for the “ISP in a box” documentation. The last step, which took longer than I thought, was getting everything to start-up at boot time.
I thought it would be easy (more…)
For Postfix and Courier IMAP configuration you need to find out the UID and the GID number for the postfix user on your server (you need the information here and here in our ISP in a box project). Because of rights management and permissioning both Postfix and Courier IMAP need the correct user and group id to access the virtual maibox directory. The information is not in the default User management System Preference panel as postfix is a system user and not a ‘normal’ user. (more…)
It always happens when you are not expecting it or when you aren’t ready at all. It does in my case anyway. As you might know I’m documenting my own efforts in using my Mac mini as an internet server for hosting websites and taking care of the mailing needs of myself, family and friends. Before I got it a stage where you would end up with a decent setup and wanted to carefully ask around what people thought about it I got hit bigtime… (more…)
On my current mailserver I do the administration manually. Adding a new mail user is a complex task of adding several records in the database and creating the virtual mailboxes with the correct ownership and permissions. It almost never works in one go, because I don’t do it very often and have forgotten what to do. Which is one of the handicaps that you get when you never document what you have done before and make it a repeat-able exercise. (more…)
As one of the prerequisites for the ISP in a box documents for your Mac mini is having a fixed IP-address. This enables you to connect your domain name to your ip-address using DNS. There are some possibilities documented in using a dynamic ip address but I now found this article that explains how you can have a domain name attached to a dynamic ip-address without to much trouble. I don’t know how it will work as I have the luxury of a fixed ip address for my server. If someone with a dynamic ip address would let me know how this works out for them and if you can add MX records as well for use with a mail server.
As Urs noted in his comment, it is possible to use MX records (you need them to be able to receive e-mail) with www.dyndns.com.