Hi all,

I am in a sticky situation at the office and i hope you guys can help me out a bit, you have in the past :-).

Anyway i have a very old Mandrake server where a previous owner hosted mailboxes on. This server is getting very slow and does alot of e-mail related tasks like:

• pop
• smtp
• mx

It runs on sendmail (which is also very outdated...) and it doesnt seem to respond to its config files. And the whole smtp and mx thing leaves us with some really weird mail problems...

So i want to implement it in our current mail setup in which i have it all on seperate servers:

• 2 smtp server (dns roundrobbing) (postfix)
• 4 mx servers (1 etrn) (postfix)
• 1 webmail server (v-webmail) (just apache and connects to the pop/imap server)
• And 1 pop/imap server (postfix, dovecot)

I also want to implement smtp authentication because of all the mobile clients i have to host... This is where it gets tricky.

I want to export the unix user table of the old mandrake server and import that into a mysql database. This database will be used to authenticate the smtp users.

I also want the export of the unix users to import it to the other pop/imap server so users can logon to that server instead of the crappy Mandrake server.

I would expect that the export from unux users to mysql (including passwords) is the hardest part. I googled it, but some of the stuff i found didnt seem to be very reliable, so thats where you guys kick in :-). So is this possible? If so, how can i do it?

I know i should go with some kind of ldap situation but that seems a way bigger hassle then this setup. And if all of this works i can, in the future, implement the whole ldap thing.

Thanks for the help and sorry for the long text.

PS. The newer servers are all CentOS 5.X

You should look at some centralized authentication (mysql? ldap?) at the minimum. The hard part here is of course getting the passwords, as unix encrypts them. You can run a password cracker on them and get a lot of them (but of course, if it gets them... they really need changed because they're insecure and brute force-able.)

Getting most of the information is very easy, everything but passwords really... getting into sql is even easy.

Quite honestly my suggestion is set a password policy and force everyone across the board to change passwords or set new passwords you deliver to them before hand prior to the mail change over.