Simon Vass started out by a short report on the SEACOM launch in Uganda. They demoed a 155 MBit/s line by video conferencing in HD from Tanzania. SEACOM is transparant of their pricing scheme being USD 50-150 per month per MBit/s.
Bernard Wanyama went through the installation of OpenSuSE 11.0 in preperation for installing a mail server. A discussion about how to partition the drive when installing. should one do one huge partition or do multiple partitions? Bernards view is to have a seperate /var partition might save you in case of a corrupt filesystem as /var is usually the most used part of the drive. Kyle Spencer told about arpalert. arpalert can run a bash script whenever a device sends out an arp packet. The issue of introducing linux into windows environments was opened. Not the technical but rather about knowledge about linux is not public. So management is scared of going with Linux as "nobody knows linux". At this time the installation of OpenSuSE was done. Next Bernard started his presentation on installing a mail server. He introduced the basic concepts of email and how an email comes from the sender to the recipient. He explained a bit about spam and the risks of viruses. Then it was time for the action part: installing and setting up a mail server. postfix is used as the MTA. RPM (package) install is preferred as it will draw any dependancees where as a source install you would have to pull the needed libraries etc. One main reason to install from source is configurability and stability - you include the functions and features you really need and nothing else. Main configuration of postfix is done by the text file /etc/postfix/main.cf A few points about best use of relays was discussed. by using your ISPs mail (relay) server you can get past a possible black listing due to previous spam runs by zombies on your network. It also saves international bandwidth if your ISP differs between local and international data. Thus you can send your mail quicker and perhaps cheaper because it is local traffic. (While setting up your mail server, set a soft-reject (450 try again later) on unknown local mail recipients and switch to the hard reject (550 unknown user) when you are sure of your setup. Dovecot is selected as the POP (Post Office Protocol) server. it can also do IMAP. We will now try to harden the server a bit by adding spam and virus control. In order to filter the messages for unwanted content (spam, vira, "dangerous" file types) we use amavis. When the mail is being accepted by postfix rather than delivering it straight away, we send it through the content filter (i.e. amavis), which will check the content and then return it to postfix for delivery. Gems on the web: * MX Toolbox - www.mxtoolbox.com * Google Apps & Google Hosted Services * dig - Command line DNS Verification * Webmail solutions - Openwebmail, Squirrel * mail2web.com - web mail front to any POP There was 15-20 attendees including James Wires' kids. This will be my last LUG meet as I am returning to Denmark. I will stay on the list and will hopefully find a nice LUG in DK that will network with LUG Uganda. Thank You for all your input during the short time I have been here. I hope to grow the friendships I have made wit you deeper, and maybe even getting to know even more of you. -- Jan Rasmussen ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Email: [email protected] Blogs: http://janholbo.blogspot.com Web: http://www.kaddu.dk http://janholbodk.blogspot.com http://kaddulinux.blogspot.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Views expressed are my own and can not be attributed to anyone else _______________________________________________ LUG mailing list [email protected] http://kym.net/mailman/listinfo/lug %LUG is generously hosted by INFOCOM http://www.infocom.co.ug/ The above comments and data are owned by whoever posted them (including attachments if any). The List's Host is not responsible for them in any way. ---------------------------------------
