Hi,

This is Amol Bhor.I am really crazy about Linux.It rocks!

I want to configure Linux Mail Server on my machine. The distribution I am using is Ubuntu 6.10. I referred the linuxhomenetworking.com site. The ISP has given static IP for my network. I was configuring the sendmail service.First I need to configure DNS,which required BIND installed I installed it.

But while configuring the named.conf file was missing which was expected in /etc directory. i tried to locate it if it was inn other directory but it was in vain.

Kindly help me.

Regards.
Retrieved from "http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/User_talk:Amol.bhor"

you don't *need* bind at all. i wouldn't recommend using it for such a small installation.

forget bind... you will not need it... :-)

i personally would use a setup with fetchmail if it was my adsl line, that way if something fails at least all my mails would still be sent and received :-)

hmm? fetchmail is no use if you're really hosting your own mail...

You should be able to used your ISP's nameserver. Not sure about Ubuntu, but for me you just need to make entries in /etc/resolv.conf like

nameserver your.isp.nameserver.ip

(eg nameserver 123.456.789.012)

when you really want to host your own mail, a adsl connection at home is not the most relyable connection, one outage and mail will bounce...
I have experienced an isp outage of over 48 hours, and as in this case there would be no backup mx server, the point of fully hosting your own mail would be kinda useless

that is why i advised fetchmail, as even if you should have an outage, mail can be delivered to the account you would collect your mail from, you can read using a wab interface, etc. nothing is lost, no need for a backup mx, no need to worry even if you should have a hardware failure.

fetchmail would provide a more relyable solution than fully hosting your own mail when there are too many possible sources for error one self would be unable to fix

Pretty much the same for ubuntu.

i'm not quit sure why you need BIND if you're trying to run a Mail server only. If you're trying to build Mail/DNS server on the same box then BIND is the way to go. I had problems with bind out of the box installed. Acctually i had to wipe out BIND RPM packages and reinstall from source.
For Rehad i issued the following command to install BIND:
yum install bind bind-devel -bind-util

and there is another package to run DNS cashing server needs to be installed.

after you reinstall BIND you should locate /etc/named.conf and make sure that all parameters are correct. /etc/named.conf tells BIND what port it should listen to and what directory the zone files are located at.

there is a lot of documents explainig how to install BIND from Scratch. Please GOOGLE.

As far as the mail server, i recommend you look at http://www.qmailrocks.org it's a good place to start. You don't need to install all components mentioned in the site but in the end you'll get a bad ass pop3/imap mail server with webmail and Antispam/AntiVirus protection although i don't recommend running spam filters on the same mail server.

good luck on post more questions.