Ubuntu & Postfix

Tue Sep 12 21:19:55 UTC 2006

Your point - I didn't know about that. Honestly, the question you
initially posted somehow read to me, like, you're trying to run an
"online" postfix installation and figuring out how to deal with it. At a
certain point, I don't really care if you do, but I think it wouldn't
have been a good idea after all, and that's what I wanted to point out.
Glad to see, however, that this hint obviously wasn't necessary after
all. :)

> You agree with what? With Mike telling me that I need to know what I'm 
> doing before I put a mail server online?
> That's what I'm trying to do, I'm trying to learn postfix better.

That's a good thing, of course. It would have been easier for you (and,
probably, some of us around here) if you pointed out that you're
actually talking about a testbed installation running inside VMWare. In
days of massive spam amount, some people tend to be very sensitive about
that. As for me - personally, I'm happy to see tools like amavis-ng or
spamassassin around to get rid of that stuff for me. But I gained enough
ugly experiences with SMTP services running online (again, I also
assumed you're talking about a postfix mail-relay which already is up
and running when reading your first mail) to plead for being _very_
_very_ careful with a setup like this. Again, being the administrator of
this machine, spam should be the least thing to really worry about...

> if they don't get it.  You tried to help because you are helpful,
> they tried discourage or chastise because they are unhappy maybe, and
> I am just trying to teach them some life lessons.  In the end, the

I don't think they tried to discourage you... For what I see, at leas
Tom has been rather kind and pointed you way to postfix.org - I wouldn't
see this as being meant to discourage anyone as postfix is documented
amazingly well, and the Howto collection is incredible.

You see, something like seven, eight years ago I walked the same way you
do right now - I ran for the postfix+amavis-ng+mysql+cyrus+procmail
setup in order to create a local MTA providing IMAP and SMTP services as
well as content filtering to a mid-sized local network. I tried to
follow a quick walk-through and spent an amazingly long time fiddling
around with things I didn't know in advance, with things I didn't even
know I would need to know to get things working (i.e. some fundamental
things about Linux/Unix networking in general - your question about how
to figure out which ports are open on a Linux machine reminded me of
that time :) ). At this point, indeed, suddenly it wasn't just all about
postfix and mail, suddenly it was all about some things way more basic.
That's what I actually (even though using way more words) intended to
express in my last mail: If attempting to successfully run a service
like SMTP (no matter whether using postfix, qmail, sendmail or
whatever), be sure that  you are at least slightly familiar with these
things, both in terms of concepts (i.e. I assume you know what a port is
in tcp/ip terminology), but also in terms of tools in the Unix / Linux
world (having at least heard about netstat, ifconfig, route, tcpdump,
telnet and probably a good port scanner like nmap). If you don't, you
probably will more often than once get stuck in a situation where you
don't know what to do, and postfix folks will by then probably not want
to help you (as your issue might not be even related to postfix but to
some network communication / configuration problem, for example).

However, and besides this: People around here don't know each other
personally, they just know about each other from the mails that are
around, and they just do have a limited set of information on each
other. By now, one doesn't know whether you are a network professional
just trying to learn how to 'operate' Linux or whether you are
completely getting started dealing with network things and just are
using Linux for given reasons. It doesn't really matter, but it does
matter as soon as one of the folks around here is trying to answer a
question in a meaningful way. ;)

Cheers,
Kris

- --
Kristian Rink *  http://zimmer428.net * jab: kawazu at jabber.ccc.de
icq: 48874445 *  fon: ++49 176 2447 2771
"Wenn einer allein träumt, ist es nur ein Traum. Wenn viele gemeinsam
träumen, ist das der Anfang einer neuen Wirklichkeit." (Hundertwasser)

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