Hi...I just registered here on the forums because I am about to kill myself. Only you can help stop me.

This is what I'm trying to do:
It seems that the order of installs have changed since this article is written. I've installed OpenSSL first, and that installed successfully (ie: with no errors). Then I moved onto IMAP. Everything seemed to have gone well until I came to this step on the document:

I did not have a file called 'imapd' in that directory. Instead, I had two symbolic links called 'imapd.c' and 'Makefile'. I thought that perhaps this was an oversight on the article author's part and copied both files to the directory anyway (I know, I shouldn't have done that...but what else could I do?). When I tried telnetting to localhost 110 and localhost 143, it killed my telnet sessions automatically.

I have made the appropriate changes to /etc/xinetd.conf, and restarted it.

I am running Red Hat 8.0

Does anyone have any idea what I can do to get that article to work? Maybe you can offer a newer, better method in it's place? Perhaps I'm making a big time newbie mistake? All I know is that starting from IMAP, my apache, and php installs were messing up.

Please let me know if any additional information could help out.

Thanks a lot.
Abs

The article on LinuxJournal is very old; you probably tried the current versions of the mentioned software.
You seem to use source tarballs instead of binary packages for your distribution. You will have to compile these before using them (this is why there is no imapd file). And you probably will run into problems doing so, as some development packages may be missing or only be available in wrong (too old) versions on your system.

In general, it is better to rely on the package management system of the distribution you use.
That means: better get the appropriate rpm files fo Red Hat 8 and install them.

Also, the article is about building a secure web server. This means that also your base system should have all the fixes installed, which is certainly not true for Red Hat 8 (support ran out about a year ago).
If you really intend to build a secure system, get a current distribution first, then use the packages delivered with it (the ones you mentioned above should be part of almost all distributions) and do an online update before starting to configure and deploy the system.

Regards
ric.

By compile, don't you mean 'make'? (My apologies, the only thing I know about Linux is what I've learned from school, and that's usually taught in a "do it this way" manner, not a "this is what you're doing" method.)

I'm going to try doing this on SuSE 9.1 instead...to be honest, it didn't even cross my mind that Red Hat had stopped support...I just used whatever box I had free.

Thanks for your thoughts, Ricstirato!

Abs

Right, make does the whole horrible task of compiling for you, if you have a proper Makefile and the necessary development packages installed.
A very common way of compiling is the sequence

cd /path/to/source/code
./configure
make
make install

which will check your system for the necessary tools and libraries, actually compile the application and finally copy the binaries, configuration files, ... to the appropriate place.

There is no reason to apologize. "There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers".

However, I strongly suggest you rely on the distribution's package management tool, which is yast (or yast2) in case of SUSE.


Regards
ric.