Pkg exim4 users - Jun 2007 - draft tutorial - Installing Exim4 and Dovecot on Debian4

Hi all,

I''ve just finished an initial draft of a guide to installing Exim4 and 
Dovecot on Etch. The guide covers an install from booting from a NetInst 
CD to testing the services with teleet. Other topics such as the use of 
th su command, rcconf and gdm with geximon and eximon are covered.

The guide is not meant to be the fastest, smallest or most secure 
installation possible, it is simply a hand-holding guide to get the 
software installed correctly before pointing the user at the official 
websites and documentation for further configuration.

I would appreciate your comments, correction and suggestions. I 
especially would like some clarification on the correct way to set a 
fqdn of "mail.example.com" either during the install or after the 
install as I got "mail.example.com.example.com" one time I tried, and 
"mail.jason.local" on other tries (where "jason.local" seems
to have
been set by my dhcp server).

The document can be downloaded from here:
http://www.exim-new-users.co.uk/content/view/201/39/

Thanks
Jason_Meers
-- 
website at: http://www.exim-new-users.co.uk
hosting by: http://www.line3.co.uk

On Tue, Jun 05, 2007 at 01:58:29PM +0100, Jason_Meers
wrote:
> I would appreciate your comments, correction and suggestions.
>
>  I especially would like some clarification on the correct way to set
>  a fqdn of "mail.example.com" either during the install or after
the
>  install as I got "mail.example.com.example.com" one time I
tried, and
>  "mail.jason.local" on other tries (where "jason.local"
seems to have
>  been set by my dhcp server).
I can just guess that you entered "mail.example.com" as the host name,
where "mail" would have been the correct answer. See the Question
"The
hostname is a single word...".  If I remember correctly, the installer
asks for your domain later in the process.

I generally find it a bad idea to choose a host name "mail" since the
service might migrate away later and/or other services may be provided
by this host, but that''s a matter of personal style.

I am, again generally, opposed to providing documentation that leads
the user click-by-click through a complex setup as your documents do,
but we have been through this a number of times and I don''t seem to be
able to stop you.

Why do you install the X Window system on a mail server?

You spell out a lot of words in capitals, for example RELAY. This is
usually wrong, they are not acronyms.

Exim4 with dovecot supports maildir just fine, the "maildir not
available" message comes from an unrelated package that must be pulled
in by your way of installing. I surely have no libc-client on any of
my mail servers, and all of them are using maildir.

You can use swaks for debugging.

Please consider using Debian''s adduser program to create system users,
and please consider having them generated with disabled login. Or,
even better, consider using mailbox storage ways that do not require a
system user.

Greetings
Marc

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