Building a mail server

Recommendations for OS Flavour

[IanTurner]

I am looking to build a secondary mail server using a Linux OS and have been given a number of ideas as to which one to use:

Red Hat
Suse
Fedora
Debian
Gentoo

Can people give me recommendations as to which is best for running on a 2 year old 850Mhz PIII platform and some idea of the pros and cons.

[SeanW]

I use Fedora for pretty much anything... Setting up a backup MX would be fairly trivial. All the packages are there (sendmail is all you really need), and yum is great at keeping things up to date.

Largely it's what you're familar with, though.

Sean

[bakedjake]

FreeBSD ;-)

But if you want Linux, I'd go with Gentoo. Especially with a server, you can customize it pretty well and leave out parts you don't need. And there's a performance increase you gain by compiling for your architecture.

I'd also recommend compiling any mail server software you use from scratch and not using packages. I'd recommend you use qmail, if you don't have a mail server software preference. Sendmail is big, slow, and has lots of security issues.

[IanTurner]

Largely it's what you're familar with, though.

Hmm I'm familiar with Win2K Server - (I have some Unix (Solaris) experience from the dark ages)

This server is the first move into Open Source for us.

The mail server needs to be able to handle multiple domains.

[IanTurner]

Having looked at mailservers - qmail looks like the way forward on that front.

So its a case of a choice that works welll with qmail.

[dkubb]

I don't have any comments on what OS to use, except what whichever you use do a minimal installation, and turn off all unecessary services.

I've used qmail for years, and installed it about a dozen times but I recently set up a box using Postfix. I really enjoyed installing it from source. I was really simple to set up and get running, much easier than my experiences with qmail.

There's a few benchmarks that say its much faster than qmail too, but of course you'll find other benchmarks that say the opposite. I can confirm that it is comparable in speed though.

[encyclo]

Hi Ian, all of the distributions of Linux you've listed are easily capable of running a mail server, with qmail, Exim or Postfix as alternatives to sendmail. The real question is: are there any other roles that the mailserver has to fulfil - and not just in the technical sense? You mention that it's your (company's) first foray into Linux - is this a testbed for a potential larger Linux rollout? Are there any PHBs who need to be convinced or impressed?

Another aspect - do you need a support contract or are you doing everything in-house? You mention Red Hat, but the only RH products other than Fedora are commercial products (eg. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3), which are non-free but include support options. If you want to go on your own, Fedora or Debian would be better. My first reaction would be to suggest Debian Stable (woody) with Postfix. It's a bit old, but very stable with all the bugs ironed out years ago. You don't need the latest and greatest on a mailserver anyway, just something that will run and run with no problems. Debian might not impress the PHBs, though...

You say that you know Solaris - you can download Solaris 9 for x86 processors, but you can't be sure your hardware is supported. FreeBSD is very Unixy, so you might like that over Linux (and FreeBSD is excellent too!).

Jake, you say that for servers you should be:

compiling any mail server software you use from scratch and not using packages

I'm not an expert, but I want to understand your reasoning behind this, as I've seen contradictory advice about packages vs. compiling. What are the advantages of a compiled, Gentoo-type setup versus, say, a minimal install of Debian Stable? With the latter, you get a much easier management of the server: just set a cron job to check security.debian.org regularly and automatically apt-get patched versions of packages in the case of a security problem, no rebuilding manually each time, and you have a stable feature-set and version. What's more, you wouldn't need a compiler like gcc on the machine at all - I thought that many rootkits depended to a certain extent on the presence of a compiler to work, so removing it helps security too, doesn't it?

[IanTurner]

is this a testbed for a potential larger Linux rollout? Are there any PHBs who need to be convinced or impressed?

It is a test bed for further Unix/Linux rollout, and the only people that need impressing are my other co-directors.

Cost and reliability of software are the two major driving factors at work. (We currently run a number of windows servers and do all our own maintenance, we would be looking to do the sme with Unix servers)

[encyclo]

I'd guessed that the mailserver was part of a larger plan. If the mailserver test goes well, what would you be thinking of running on Linux afterwards? As a mailserver is basic stuff for any system, you'd need to think about longer-term needs and pick a distribution or Unix variant that covers all of your requirements. Is it just the standard mailserver plus Apache, MySQL etc. site hosting stuff, or do you have any more specialist needs?

If the former, you should look at Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SUSE's professional lineup if you need the commercial support options (but it'll cost you), or Debian (my favorite - harder to install, but so easy to administer) and FreeBSD (great for web servers) if you want to manage it all yourself.

[IanTurner]

The plan is something like this:

Backup mailserver

Full mailserver + webmail (probably apache based)

Webserver with PHP + MySQL

Network file server for Windows Desktops (if this is possible)

This is probably a 12-18 month learning and implementation plan.

We'll look at the situation again at that point.