Need new mail server. Right now.

A rather unfortunate and horrible series of events resulted in the urgent need for me to build a new mail server.
The old one was poked, bad file system corruption, and just wasn't worth trying to fix it. It was very old and had been dying for a while anyway. All of the actual maildir mail was on my solaris nfs server, so nothing was lost in that sense, but the job of building a new server to serve that mail up again has been something that I've been dreading.

I've been putting of rebuild/migrating to a new mail server infrastructure because I still clearly remembered just know long it took to build the first time around. The first time around I built pretty much everything from hand, and taught myself ldap along the way.

With mail queuing up around the world, and not just for me but also for friends and family too for whom I host mail, it was time to build a new mail server.

My initial immediate reaction was that I needed to fire up a new Solaris zone and to roll some sleeves up.
Before embarking on the arduous quest, I took a break for food and hopefully some near-divine inspiration....which didn't come.
What did come however was some perspective on my planned sadism.
[Open]Solaris doesn't come with courier-imap, postfix, amavisd, spam assassin... in fact it pretty much doesn't come with anything that I actually need to build a modern day open source mail server platform.
I thought this was somewhat ironic given that Solaris has always been a proud server OS, which is why many people complain that it's not yet ready for the desktop; because there is so much desktop software still missing, and yet here I am realising that the mail server lineup wasn't looking flash. In fact it's worse than not flash, it actually ships with sendmail...*shudder*

Sun does have the monstrous Sun Java System Messaging Server, but that was way bigger and more complex than I probably needed, and while in this case it wouldn't have been a problem for me, it's not free/oss software.

So, on to building all this software by hand again, on a non-GNU environment. fun!
No this is 2009, a year where more and more people are proclaiming that the OS doesn't matter any more... and you know what, they're right.

I think the measure of a good SA is using the right tool for the job, not just stubbornly and religiously sticking your belief in a near-holy, and faultless OS of choice.
There are a number of FOSS operating systems out there and while I love Solaris, I'm big enough to not only admit when it's not the answer , but to actually proclaim when it's not the right tool for the job - and this is that job.

For shame Solaris.... FOR SHAME!

No the answer is of course to use linux.
I've been using Ubuntu quite a bit for various tasks and installs lately so in the interests of learning something new, I decided to take another look at opensuse, this time at version 11.1.

Jumping on their website I was able to quickly search for the software that I wanted to use, and was pleasantly surprised to see that everything I wanted to use was there, and with very recent versions of said software.
I downloaded the iso via bit torrent, and installed into a VM called Athena - the goddess of heroic endeavor. (She is going to be doing battle with the evil doers of the 21st century after all. The spammers!)

Installing the distro was dead easy, and adding the software was very simple too. I won't bother outlining it.
I installed courier-authdaemon, courier-imap, amavisd, clamav and went about configuring everything.

I wanted to use nfs4, and I hit some problems that eventually went away with a reboot. I'm still not quite sure what went wrong, but I think it was something to do with the required kernel module not being loaded.
With the user names matched up, the appropriate firewall rules configured (a big plus in favour of nfs4. 1 static port for all nfs traffic!), the old mail store mounted and was accessible.

Setting up courier-authdaemon took quite a few tries to get right; my authentication and mail information is all stored in an ldap directory.
Once that was done, I moved on to postfix.

Postfix is pretty easy to work with, but there are a lot of lines to change in the config file and the version that came with opensuse 11.1 (2.5.5) was a couple of major versions newer than the 2.3.x that I'd been using previously so I took the chance to familiarise myself with some of the newer config options.

Pretty soon mail was flowing through nicely, and I left it there for the moment. Webmail and content filtering to come next.