[Dovecot] Ok, I've given up

[Ed W]

On 17/06/2010 09:46, Chuck McManis wrote:
> Out of curiosity, lets say you were given the task I've set for myself 
> which
> is described thusly:
>
> Provide a system that gives shell and email service to a dozen users, hosts
> perhaps 15 or so mailing lists, provides DNS for 20 - 30 machines.
>
> Preferred OS and what makes it the one you choose?
> Preferred MTA and what makes it the one you choose?
> Name service?
> ssh implementation?
> Hardware?

This is probably a good "slashdot asks" question... A million replies 
driven by what people are familiar with...

I think you already named all the main software packages, so really bar 
some smaller apps (which definitely will work better for certain more 
niche projects!) you really have:

- Postfix/Sendmail (and perhaps qmail) for smtp
- Dovecot / Cyrus (and perhaps Courier) for imap

I should think that the real point is the management of all of the 
above.  Yes any reasonably competent user here can probably manage a one 
off server, but managing one "for a friend", ie for very little cost 
(perhaps 5 mins a year) will mean a requirement for some management tools

Perhaps someone else can name a bunch of distros which package the above 
up with a nice GUI and make a cool integrated system?  Obviously at the 
larger end you have the Scalix / Open Exchange / SOGO, etc (insert 5 
more here) type systems, but all the ones I know of feel a bit bulky for 
a small office?

Probably the answer for many is to go hosted..?

What I have is a rails app using ActiveScaffold which manages a fairly 
generic database and allows me to very easily manage users across all 
servers in a very simple way.  Very happy to opensource it if someone 
wanted to do some spade work to tidy it up, but really it can be 
re-implemented in a few hours by anyone competent with Rails and I'm 
very happy to share my DB schema which is really the trick

My system uses:

- Dovecot (changed from Courier some years ago, no experience of Cyrus, 
but sounds like a competitor)
- Postfix (never used qmail, used Sendmail in the early 90s and never 
ever ever want to see it again (sorry))
- Spamassassin
- P0f
- Clamav
- Fail2ban + simple iptables rules
- Mysql for database, every main app keys into a single schema
- DNSCache for local dnscache on the servers, but found dnsmasq ample 
for a home office size setup.  DNSmadeeasy.com for domain hosting...


I think without my custom rails app to manage the DB schema it would be 
a complete pain to admin, but all it takes is a basic gui to transform 
such a bag of bits to something useful...

Good luck

Ed W