Postfix and Squirrel Mail Server Setup
 

Hey all. I have a few questions about Postfix and Squirrel Mail.

I currently have a web/mail server setup with Squirrel Mail as it's interface. I only allow Ports 80 and 25 open to the public.

I was wondering if anyone out there is using this same setup (even with sendmail) and how they setup their drives/partitions.

I want to make sure I have setup enough drive space to handle atleast the next year or two of mail activity.

The server itself will have a total of 18GB's of storage minus the system install. Most of my users are only allowed a total of 100 mb of mail storage so I should have enough room to handle up to 100 users. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

green one

As for partitions, what follows deals only with the management of partitions. If you have several physical drives you can further optimize your setup by separating high demand partitions on different devices. (eg: /var/spool/mail, /var/log, /usr, /var/www)

Yep- I pretty much have the same setup on one of our mail servers. Some imortant partitions to think about are;

Your webmail directory - this is where squirrelmail lives. If for example your webmail url is webmail.nowhere.net your DocumentRoot directive for that URL would need to point to whetever directory you will be 'running' squirrelmail from. Use whatever document root you want. In general it's a pretty good idea to keep all your www stuff on one partition or logical volume as it can make management a little easier.

Your data directory - this is where squirrelmail keeps user prefs and temporarily uploads user attachments. This directory does not need to be huge so making a separate partition for it isn't necessary. Please see the security notes at squirrelmail.org for importatnt infomation about securing the data directory.

Your postfix inbox - User mail is delivered to /var/spool/mail/<username>, which is the Inbox for IMAP. It's a good idea to use a separate partition/volume for management of backups, migrations, etc. Check your postfix main.cf mailbox_size_limit = to limit the size on the _Inbox_. Users can only keep mail up to the size_limit in their Inbox folder. Once it is filed away it moves from the Inbox to a local file in the /home/username directory. So in effect the /var/spool/mail needs to be #of_users x mailbox_size_limit + mail for admin, root at a minimum.

The /home directory is where user's mail lives once it is moved from their Inbox to another Imap folder. Size here would be based on number of users and user quotas. A separate partition for /home is a good idea.

Our mail servers use separate RAID volumes for /home and /var/spool/mail.

For this many users you should probably place the mail server behind a decent firewall and look into an intrusion detection system (tripwire, snort, etc.) 'Unspawn' has built extensive coverage of this topic in the Security forum here at LQ and I highly recommend you read it.