Nerhood Weblog

I’m in the process of building a new Linux server at the office (Dell PowerEdge 1650). I’m building it using Fedora. Given that this box is going to do a lot, I figured I’d keep a log of all of the things that I have done so that it will be easier to troublehoot as well as to replicate in the future.

2/2 - I also installed Mailgraph - a RRDtool frontend for Postfix statistics, so graph the amount of email traffic flowing through the box (it also categorizes the traffic and errors for spam, rejects, etc.)

2/2 - I installed amavis-stats which reports and graphs statistics about the viruses passing throught the system

2/2 - Installed RRDTool which will be used by many things for graphing performance.

1/30 - Installed amavisd-new a wrapper for ClamAV so that it can be used by postfix to scan emails for viruses. Amavisd can also integrate SpamAssassin, but I chose not to go this route becuase I wanted more control over SA then I would have gotten.

1/28 - Installed ClamAV an GPL UNIX anti-virus application. I did the install via up2date and the rpm (need to modify u2pdate config see clamav site for details)

1/27 - change the options in /etc/init.d/spamd to SPAMDOPTIONS=”-d -c -a -m5 -u mail –socketpath=/var/run/spamd.sock -H”

1/27 - Copy redhat-rc-script.sh script to /etc/init.d/spamd and then chkconfig –add spamd to get it to start automatically at boot time.

1/26 - Install SpamAssassin (the best anti-spam software!)

1/26 - Installed pyzor an opensource razor clone. I suspect that I will need to modify the mail account so that I can run the discover options of both pyzor and razor, but we’ll see.

1/26 - Installed DCC. I also got dccifd working (this is a first). All you need to do is copy /var/dcc/libexec/rcDCC to /etc/init.d/DCC. Then run chkconfig –add DCC to add it to automatically start at bootup.

1/26 - Before complining razor, there is a patch in the SpamAssassin distribution to make razor work in taint mode. I applied it to the source tree before compling with patch -p0 -d /usr/local/src/razor-agents-2.36/lib/Razor2/ < Razor2.patch

1/26 - Installed razor, this required the following perl modules to be installed (did this via CPAN)

Test::Pod
Net::Ping
Net::DNS
Time::HiRes
Digest::SHA1
Getopt::Long
File::Copy
Digest::Nilsimsa
URI::Escape

1/26 - had to do a force install of the Net::SSLeay perl module (via CPAN), but everything looks OK

1/22 - enable asynchronous logging for postfix by putting a singe dash “-” in front of the /var/log/maillog entry in /etc/syslog.conf file

1/22 - Run the following three commands to copy the necessary files so that postfix can be run chroot

cp -p /etc/localtime /var/spool/postfix/etc/localtime
cp /etc/resolv.conf /var/spool/postfix/etc/resolv.conf
cp /etc/hosts /var/spool/postfix/etc/hosts

1/22 - I had to create the /var/spool/postfix/etc directory. There was actually a file named that with the contents from /etc/resolv.conf file

1/22 - Edit /etc/postfix/aliases and update the root entry to point to a “real” person

1/22 - Use ntsysv to have postfix load automatically.

1/22 - Installed Postfix email system with yum install postfix

1/22 - Removed all sendmail packages with rpm -qa | grep sendmail | xargs rpm -e command

1/21 - Updated ntp to listen to our two external ntp servers (entries in /etc/ntp.conf and /etc/ntp.d/step-tickers). This insures accurate time sync across all of our servers. Also have to comment out the restrict default ignore and restrict 127.0.0.1 entry in /etc/ntp.conf file.

1/21 - Installed Dell OpenManage Server Assistant - requires some specifc updates see this post for details

1/19 - Updated system using yum update command (requires babysitting)

1/19 - Installed Fedora (have to use NFS Mount install)