Ottawa Valley SAGE

Archive for the ‘Training/Education’ Category

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Back in November or December I told the group about the LOPSA mentoring project and the call for volunteers at the community meeting at LISA. I believe that I had also stated that I had volunteered to be a mentor and I’m happy to announce that a project came up and that I have been matched up with someone who requires assistance with a backup system.

While we haven’t really started yet (this only just happened) I’m hoping that it will be a pleasant experience for both of us. Once the project is completed, I’ll post a note about the project and the solution used, as well as a link to software and the type of environment. I’m hoping it may make a useful talk for a meeting or at the very least an outline as to how we solved a technical problem. As it is a short term project, I’m hoping We will have it completed before the April meeting so I can at least report the success of the project.

For those who are unaware, the LISA 2010 conference registration has been opened. Visit the Usenix event page for detailed information and to register.

For the unknowing or uninformed, LISA is the big annual System Administration conference sponsored by Usenix. LOPSA has a hand in there as well. If you are really going to make this a career and not just a job, you should attend one of these conferences. Words do not really describe the experience. Ask Kelly some time.

To give you an idea of what is happening, this is the schedule for the week:

I have uploaded the config files I talked about during the meeting. These files make reference to some extra items such as greylisting and spamassassin, as well as the use of self-signed SSL certificates. You will notice a new menu item on the site under About called ovSAGE Downloads. Go there for the tarball which contains the default and production files as well as diff files for each pair.

The main documents for all of this are located on the CentOS website. The following items describe the docs and their locations:

• If you are starting over, the basic postfix install document is located here: Postfix HOWTO
• In order to do the greylisting under postfix, have a look at the Greylisting HOWTO
• To get spamassassin running, you need the spamassassin rpm installed. There is a HOWTO on using it along with anti-virus software at PostfixMail.com. I believe I just installed the package, enabled it and ran the update rules script to get it working. This site is a little more ambitious.
• One final item is creating and managing self-signed SSL certificates. I normally do this from the command line, but I had heard of a project for keeping track and managing them. It’s called tinyCA and you can find it at sm-zone.net. It uses  X-windows, so you will need to run it on one of your unix boxes. I can go over the usage next meeting after the presentation, but it is pretty straight forward and playing with it should work out OK. Don’t worry if you mess up at first, just revoke and delete any bad certificates. Unless you are a security paranoid and like generating certificates, make your certs longer than one year.

I think that covers everything. I am using all of the stuff we discussed to redo the ovsage mail server and provide authenticated SMTP from outside as well as secure IMAP access for my smartphone and laptop.

A future session will cover setting up squirrelmail as an SSL protected web front-end to your mailserver. As I have not installed this yet, I’ll probably do it live so you can all see it being done.