Samba SIG Updates: "A long time ago, on a server far, far away..."

This coming Saturday is the 3rd Saturday of the month, which means the Samba & Network Admin SIG will be going on at HAL-PC from 2-4pm.

Luckily for all of us, Robert Spotswood has been good enough to condense the activity from prior meetings. You can subscribe to the Samba SIG email list to get these announcements, but I'll also be posting them here. Here then, are the notes from the January meetings.

Subject: update for 01/09/10

Date: Monday 11 January 2010

From: Robert S

To: "SambaSIG Announce"

Rick and I continued to work through the Postfix/Dovecot tutorial. We have now completed it through the authenticated SMTP page. At this point we have a mail server that can send and receive emails, although so far we have only tested it via telnet. If telnet works, so should any regular email client. However, in doing tests that weren't in the tutorial, we discovered a problem with testing it further.

Gunn (at least I think this is his doing) has wisely chosen to block all outbound port 25 connections for most of HAL. This means we can't send email outside HAL to accounts we own. On the flip side, it also means a spammer can't enter HAL, use one of the public computers and leave HAL with a black eye. A good trade-off IMHO. The solution Rick and I came up with to play with the email server further is to set up our own mini-Internet with another email server (or two!). We can use the lab machines next door to SIG C, two of which have DVD drives and removable HD trays. The plan is to get two HDs, put them in removable trays, plug the trays into the two machines, install KirraMail on them, and set them up as other temporary email servers with fake domains so we can send and recieve email from other mail servers. We will need a couple of old HD's donated. We also will need to set up a DNS server for all of them to use, so the email servers can find the MX servers. Rick suggested Dell could write the config and zone files, and all we have to do is plug in the correct IPs once we know them. Can you do it Dell?

We will also have to adjust the resolv.conf on the two (or three) email servers to point to the DNS server, and maybe the client test machines. Since all the other computers get their DNS info via DHCP, this shouldn't cause any

problems with the rest of HAL while we do this. We can also use this setup for trying the other email server configs we will

be looking at.

Questions? Comments?

And THEN!!!

From: Robert S

Date: Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 10:32 PM

Subject: last meeting (01/15/10)

To: SambaSIG Announce

This time Dell, with just a little assistance from the crowd, set up a DNS server template with three "fake" domains. This is necessary to begin building an email server test environment. The reasons we need this were discussed in the 01/09/2010 update. At this point, it is complete and all we may have to do is change a 6 IP addresses once we know what they are, and reload the config. One HD has been donated to Rick to get an install from his KirraMail CD. We could use another. Anyone? In the meantime, this is enough to being testing the Postfix/Dovecot setup we have, which will hopefully happen next meeting.

We also have a DHCP failover lab coming up, but nothing is scheduled yet.

There you have it, notes from the January meetings. The first Saturday of February will be posted soon. Stay tuned!