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Sp00n

Sp00n

Sp00n

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Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
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Brighton
I recently started a new management job and I have acquired a FreeBSD email server running sendmail/procmail/imanager/spamassassin.

Now it's been doing some strange things like denying smtp access randomly and after a bit of reading it seems that its common with older versions of sendmail.

Unfortunately its FreeBSD 4.7 and the version of sendmail is 8.13.6, so its not new and I'm wondering what sort of limitations I'm going to be hitting.

Also, I know next to nothing about bsd but I am pretty quick to pickup stuff so I'm not that scared, I just need to be pointed in the right direction.

Now on a linux system I would just use apt-get update/upgrade, is there something similar I can use for BSD? I read something about portsnap or portmanager but I don't really get it.
 
Upgrade the whole system? Is that something I can do from the CLI?

Sorry all of this has kind of been dumped on me, I'm a windows man at heart.
 
Freebsd has a great handbook that is kept up to date.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/portsnap.html

basically running

portsnap fetch
portsnap update

will extract ports to /usr/ports

see this site for more information about each port: http://www.freshports.org/

for example if you want to install the latest sendmail you would run

cd /usr/ports/mail/sendmail/ && make install clean

http://www.freshports.org/mail/sendmail/

This will fetch all the deps and install it to the default location.

I would recommend upgrading freebsd to version 7 or 8. But a lot of people swear by version 4.7 for servers. But i would just use the latest.

Hope that helps.

edit: freebsd 4.7 is EOL for 6 years now. So i would install the latest freebsd.
 
Last edited:
Oxy said:
How did you get this job? :D
Click to expand...

Every server is windows except for this VPS which runs our mail off site, I have noticed some problems and I'm pro-actively fixing them, that and the previous admin only administrated it via imanager so the OS didn't mean anything to him.

Portsnap isn't installed so I guess that's my first stop.

Will the latest version of sendmail run on 4.7?

Also, I appear to be missing /usr/ports/sysutil/portsnap

Haha... pkg_add gives me: package not found, christ this distro is soooooo old
 
Last edited:
Just forget ports on 4.7 and install directly from source. I have no idea which version of sendmail works with 4.7, but i think it would be more the deps that need to be updated than the actual kernel version.

Can't you just reinstall the entire server to something that you are familiar with ?
 
The company is a joke, the VPS is a joke (4gb hdd) and we're running tight on funds right now.

Unfortunately what I am familiar with is windows running exchange which is too expensive, I need to find an alternative option elsewhere but I just wanted to see if I can resolve some issues that were going on right now.
 
Suggest you actually find out what's wrong before you go and change things.

Look in /var/log

and try to identify any errors in the logs that coincide with the random smtp access denies
 
Sp00n said:
Unfortunately what I am familiar with is windows running exchange which is too expensive, I need to find an alternative option elsewhere but I just wanted to see if I can resolve some issues that were going on right now.
Click to expand...

Hosted Exchange / GMail. Let someone else worry with the admin :)

As to your Sendmail problem, i'd not recommend just randomly upgrading in the hope of fixing stuff. You'll just break it worse. Look at switching MTA to Exim, that's much easier to admin.
 
Sp00n said:
The company is a joke, the VPS is a joke (4gb hdd) and we're running tight on funds right now.

Unfortunately what I am familiar with is windows running exchange which is too expensive, I need to find an alternative option elsewhere but I just wanted to see if I can resolve some issues that were going on right now.
Click to expand...

Zimbra? Haven't looked into the costs though...
 
u could try jsut using sysinstall.

or it might be /stand/sysinstall, cant remember which version it was changed in.

anyways, this will open a gui and list the packages available.

the problem is, that quite a lot of the time, new packages are not maintained for older version of the OS, so you might not be able to install them via the packages.


u could have course install them manually, by downloading the latest sources and compiling.

if you can, it might be better to reinstall a newer version of FreeBSD, and running something like Exim instead
 
Sp00n said:
The company is a joke, the VPS is a joke (4gb hdd) and we're running tight on funds right now.

Unfortunately what I am familiar with is windows running exchange which is too expensive, I need to find an alternative option elsewhere but I just wanted to see if I can resolve some issues that were going on right now.
Click to expand...

If you want a windows mail server mdeamon wouldn't be a bad shout. Fairly cheap and has enough features.

I admire you for taking on such an old server. :D
 
google hosted mail, postfix on linux is very easy, like 10 lines in a txt file :) from memory I think google mail is like £25 a user a year.
 
inph said:
Suggest you actually find out what's wrong before you go and change things.

Look in /var/log

and try to identify any errors in the logs that coincide with the random smtp access denies
Click to expand...

It happened again this morning, a user tries to log in and gets this stupid error message again, I was tailing the log file to see what was going on and I saw this:

Sep 2 07:58:57 worthmedia ipop3d[86174]: Login user=ndodd host=[x.x.x.x] nmsgs=19/19
Sep 2 07:58:57 worthmedia ipop3d[86174]: Update user=ndodd host=[x.x.x.x] nmsgs=19 ndele=0
Sep 2 07:58:57 worthmedia ipop3d[86174]: Logout user=ndodd host=[x.x.x.x]
Sep 2 07:58:57 worthmedia sm-mta[86181]: AUTH=server, relay=[x.x.x.x], authid=ndodd, mech=PLAIN, bits=0
Click to expand...

Whereas a "normal" login looks like this:

Sep 2 07:58:59 worthmedia ipop3d[86196]: Login user=smeno host=[x.x.x.x] nmsgs=0/0
Sep 2 07:59:00 worthmedia ipop3d[86196]: Update user=smeno host=[x.x.x.x] nmsgs=0 ndele=0
Click to expand...

the thing is, the server allows PLAIN authentication as I've checked this via telnet and EHLO.

Now the user said he "fixed" it by changing his location on his mac from automatic to the company wifi, but it would have selected that anyway as there are no other wireless networks within range.

It's just so stupid and makes no sense, I'm going through sendmail.cf now to see if there is anything I can see.
 
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