Switching…

Besides some of the time I have to spend on other things this weekend I found some time to improve and continue on the documentation for the ISP in a box v2.

I’ve checked the installation procedure again after some reports of errors of using the installation with phpMyAdmin. I seemed there was an important option missing from the configuration command.

Next stop was building the mail server, I ‘ve got the build process documented and checked properly. Next up is documenting the configuration of the mailserver.

You can have a look at the new pages for building the server, hope you like the new look. I’ve made some changes to the style sheet to make the commands and the configuration stick out a bit more and make them more readable.

I hope there are no issues with relocation of the MySQL, Apache, and PHP documentation, they where still located in the hierarchy of version 1 and I had to put them in the correct place. Sorry….

Donations where a bit slow these last 2 weeks, didn’t receive any, and the Adsense income these weeks has also been slow. A well, it’s not that important, I will need to be a bit patient. That will give me more time to document everything proper before launching myself at a new toy

I got a notice from the postfix announce mailing list that Wietse Venema has released an update on Postfix. Its to fix some minor issues which might not have been a problem to personally, well I didn’t have any issues on my installation, but it’s good to keep up to date. To quote from the email:

- “sendmail -t” did not remove the CR from lines ending in CRLF.

- Workaround for fatal errors in PCRE maps when an expression in
() matches empty text (the PCRE library returns an inappropriate
error code).

- Fixes for non-security bugs that Coverity found in code that
handles impossible error conditions.

Updating is as easy as documented in the previous patch. Just download the source from you nearest mirror (check if you get the latest, not all mirrors update frequently), extract it and run the compile and install commands as documented in the build page. (more…)

I’ve had some problems today with emails being blocked from users using GMail accounts and after some researching and Googling I found out that Spamcop.het sometimes block email from Gmail. Even Google had a warning on the Gmail Help Center and an explanation why it was blocked. It’s because, according to Google, it doesn’t want to forward your ip-address in the header and wants to give you the idea of some privacy. I personally find this too aggressive to my liking.

I advised not so long ago that you could use blacklists to prevent spam. I also warned that you should determine yourself which ones you needed to use as some of them block faster than others. Now that I found this out about spamcop.net I’m removing it from my configuration.

To do this yourself you need to edit the file ‘/etc/postfix/main.cf’ and remove the line:

reject_rbl_client bl.spamcop.net,

This will remove the spamcop blacklist from your setup. You’ll need to trust the junk mail filtering in Thunderbird or Mail.app a bit more. I’m still working on the spamassassin setup but haven’t finished with it yet. I guess I’ll have to give that some higher priority after this.

update: Found an article on Techworld.com that gives some backgound info.

It has been a very busy week and not just for me. Wietse Venema (author of Postfix) released a version 2.2.9 of the Postfix mail-server and I also got an email from Sam Varshavchik on the Courier-announce mailing list that there is an updated version of the Courier IMAP server. Which meant that I had to download, compile, install and test all these new versions again on my test server before I could update my own server and tell you it was safe to upgrade. (more…)

Today is my birthday, a day you do not intend to spend behind a computer screen, but I couldn’t resist to tell you about the success I had yesterday evening. I’ve got spamassassin working on my mail-server. The install is still very rough and not something I’m keeping as is. But it works ! I still need to train the filter a bit more and have been feeding my personal mail archive through it as well as some archives from the Spam Archive. (more…)

Spam is a very annoying experience. People try to do everything to get their stuff sold, while others try everything possible not to receive these messages. Having your own mail-server makes you vulnerable for spammers when you don’t configure your mail-server properly. Luckily the default configuration settings in Postfix make your server secure enough and don’t create an email server anyone can abuse.

One thing you would want to avoid is that regular email that you want to receive is not blocked. Spam filters check for keywords and block email based on the content of the email, this might be useful until your best friend starts boasting about his adventures with viagra via email. Before I started experimenting with spam filters I wanted to find out what else one could to reduce the amount of spam. (more…)

I’ve got the server running for some days now and I must say it’s handling the load quit well. The only thing I had trouble with migrating easily was the squirrel webmail program, it had some problems with the include path and I didn’t feel like re-installing it. I’ve received emails from people saying that I should use Roundcube for web based email, not getting squirrel to run was the perfect excuse I needed to try and install it. (more…)

I’ve started the new year with migrating everything from my old Sun Ultra 5′s who have been running my internet services for the past few years to the Mac mini. The pages you are looking at now are served from a Mac mini as it was my intention for some time. The mini is setup using my own documentation with no deviation whatsoever. (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…)