Setup a mail server with IMAP?
 

Hi there, havent started using Linux just yet so i wanted to see if i could get some information concerning a network.We are curently trying to set up a small SOHO network whereby users could log in to a Linux server( lookin at openSUSE at the moment), authenticate and log in to its services such as file storage/acces/sharing and the like.What i need to know is if its possible to set up a mail server within that same server to receive mail from 2 different domain adresses.The reason is that 1 user has an mail address diferent from the other partner (e.g tom@grog.de and the other is cruise@dragon.fj)..Is there any way around this? Someone mentioned to me that it was possible to do this using an IMAP something or other.
Please help.
By the way, all the clients runon MS Windows OS (either XP or Vista)
Thanks for any advise that might help

Hello,

you can have virtual domains in the same server with imap (courier and cyrus works).
You'll need to authenticate the users by their emails or some other unique id.
I'd use a ldap directory as backend to make the integration with the MTA easily and also authenticate the user (cyrus can use saslauth). With some filters the MTA can deliver the messages to the right user and the authentication can be made by the email.
If you'll use postfix as MTA, you could use this as filter:
query_filter = (mail=%u@%d)
result_attribute= uid

And in the saslauth, you could use this:

ldap_filter: mail=%u

I hope that this will be useful.

Tulio Munhoz

Ohh OK..Thank you Tulio,
The fact is that i dont know anything at all about Linux and am trying to do as much reading as i can to see what needs to be done to make this network possible.It only consists of 5 PCs, 3 network printers and the proposed Linux server.I am quite at home with setting up a netwrok in Windows but am a little bit unsure of how to proceed with Linux.There are a lot of terms that i am quite unfamiliar with and if you could just explain a little more in detail about what i need to do and what those commands will enable the system to perform, i would be grateful.Ohh, just 2 more things that you could advise me on ; the Linux server(defintely looking at openSUSE 11 now), needs to authenticate the users when they log in to the domain.They should be able to create and access their own separate folder and is it possible to do backups automatically on the server for their individual or collective data?
Thank you so much for all your help

Hello iliapi,

the setup of the network that you want is perfectly possible, but you'll need to learn about some applications:
With samba you can do the integration between linux and windows. You can authenticate the workstations as a domain controller, share folders and printers and keep the users' files centralized to do backups easily. The installation in opensuse is done typing as root:
zypper install samba

A good start point to learn samba is http://us1.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-Guide/ and http://us1.samba.org/samba/docs/man/...TO-Collection/
In the yast there is a configuration wizard that could help you in your first setup (I guess that the option is labeled as "Samba server").

To send emails a good choice is postfix. The basic setup is easy and you can learn at http://www.postfix.org/BASIC_CONFIGURATION_README.html.
To read the emails received by postfix, you'll need a pop3/imap server. Courier (http://www.courier-mta.org/imap/) or cyrus-imapd (http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/) are good ones and I guess that opensuse comes with both.

Each application above can have an exclusive users' database. You can integrate using OpenLDAP. It is important you understand the concept of directory services before configure the application (the same is valid to the other services). There is a good documentation at http://www.openldap.org/doc/admin24/

And the backup depends of what kind of backup do you want. If you have a tape drive, you can use tar (a simple command line tool) or a more complex application as amanda (http://www.amanda.org/) or bacula (http://www.bacula.org/en/).

There is a lot of information that you'll need to assimilate, probably you'll have many doubts but I'll be happy if I may help in some way.

Regards,
Tulio Munhoz

Being unfamiliar with Linux you might want to look at these two Distros.. Geared for what you want to do.

clarkconnect http://www.clarkconnect.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarkconnect

sme server - http://wiki.contribs.org/Main_Page

Thanks again Tulio...Actully i forgot to mention something concerning the backup..The machine that we are going to purchase for the file and mail server will have a RAID 1 drive system installed...runnning 2 750GB HDD....if i am correct in my assumption of RAID, it will mirror everything on 1st disk to the second disk installed right?..
so..even though we have a lot of space in the drive, they want to back up the data anyway on a removable hard disk.
Please tell me if this is possibele and if i have to use the tar method or whatever its called to back it up, will the data still be readable if i, say..take and open the data on another MS Windows machine??

Hi,

yes, with RAID 1, the data will be mirrored to the other disk. But this does no dismiss the backup in another media.
If you only rely on RAID, you will not be safe of human or logical errors (ie: deleted or corrupted files).
Windows can open .tar files with winzip (and other applications), but the file system in the external drive must be FAT or NTFS.
This solution (use of external disk) isn't the most reliable, but is better than nothing.

I have also witnessed drives in a RAID array, fail during the rebuild process, after you replaced a drive that had a fault. This rendered the entire array useless.

RAID is definitely not a substitute for good backups, but it does help reduce down time.

OK..so the external hard drive must have the hard disk formatted in FAT or NTFS rite?..Good..thats clear.Is it also possible somehow to leave it connected to the Linux machine and have it perform backups automatically?..I have read somewhere that you can do something called íncremental backups´?Is that possible using a GUI interface?

Hi,

I'd use the file system formatted in FAT. The write in NTFS file system is recent and I don't know if it is stable. A second opinion would be nice.
You can schedule backups as a task in cron (execute in your shell: "man cron" and "man 5 crontab").
tar supports incremental backups, but I never used this option.
If you want some start point, check this: http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manu...tal-Dumps.html

There is a frontend to tar in Yast (option System), maybe it could be useful.

The external backup drive on my home system is EXT3, but then to access anything on it I would be using another Linux box, so I don't need to worry about a file system Windows would be able to access. So it depends on your setup..

NTFS would work fine if you used the NTFS-3G driver in Linux (included in most distros, but possibly not installed.)
http://www.ntfs-3g.org/


You could do ext2 and add a driver to windows to access it as well..
http://ext2fsd.sourceforge.net/
http://www.fs-driver.org/
http://www.chrysocome.net/explore2fs