There is a new version of this tutorial available for Fedora 18.

Virtual Users And Domains With Postfix, Courier And MySQL (Fedora Core 5)

Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme

This tutorial is Copyright (c) 2006 by Falko Timme. It is derived from a tutorial from Christoph Haas which you can find at http://workaround.org. You are free to use this tutorial under the Creative Commons license 2.5 or any later version.

This document describes how to install a mail server based on Postfix that is based on virtual users and domains, i.e. users and domains that are in a MySQL database. I'll also demonstrate the installation and configuration of Courier (Courier-POP3, Courier-IMAP), so that Courier can authenticate against the same MySQL database Postfix uses.

The resulting Postfix server is capable of SMTP-AUTH and TLS and quota (quota is not built into Postfix by default, I'll show how to patch your Postfix appropriately). Passwords are stored in encrypted form in the database (most documents I found were dealing with plain text passwords which is a security risk). In addition to that, this tutorial covers the installation of Amavisd, SpamAssassin and ClamAV so that emails will be scanned for spam and viruses.

The advantage of such a "virtual" setup (virtual users and domains in a MySQL database) is that it is far more performant than a setup that is based on "real" system users. With this virtual setup your mail server can handle thousands of domains and users. Besides, it is easier to administrate because you only have to deal with the MySQL database when you add new users/domains or edit existing ones. No more postmap commands to create db files, no more reloading of Postfix, etc. For the administration of the MySQL database you can use web based tools like phpMyAdmin which will also be installed in this howto. The third advantage is that users have an email address as user name (instead of a user name + an email address) which is easier to understand and keep in mind.

This tutorial is based on Fedora Core 5 (i386). You should already have set up a basic Fedora system, as described here (for a x86_64 system, but the procedure for i386 systems is the same): https://www.howtoforge.com/perfect_setup_fedora_core_5 and https://www.howtoforge.com/perfect_setup_fedora_core_5_p2. Plus, you should make sure that the firewall is off (at least for now) and that SELinux is disabled (this is important!), as shown on https://www.howtoforge.com/perfect_setup_fedora_core_5_p3.

This howto is meant as a practical guide; it does not cover the theoretical backgrounds. They are treated in a lot of other documents in the web.

This document comes without warranty of any kind! I want to say that this is not the only way of setting up such a system. There are many ways of achieving this goal but this is the way I take. I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

 

1 Edit /etc/hosts

Our hostname in this example is server1.example.com, and it has the IP address 192.168.0.100, so we change /etc/hosts as follows:

vi /etc/hosts
# Do not remove the following line, or various programs
# that require network functionality will fail.
127.0.0.1               localhost.localdomain localhost
192.168.0.100           server1.example.com server1

 

2 Configure An Additional Repository For Fedora Packages

Some of the packages we have to install (such as courier-imap) are not included in the official Fedora repositories, so we have to add another repository to yum:

rpm -ivh http://www.enlartenment.com/packages/fedora/5/i386/enlartenment-release-1.1-2.fc5.mf.noarch.rpm

Afterwards, we must set enabled to 1 in /etc/yum.repos.d/enlartenment.repo:

vi /etc/yum.repos.d/enlartenment.repo
[enlartenment]
name=Enlartenment Repository for $releasever - $basearch
baseurl=http://www.enlartenment.com/packages/fedora/$releasever/$basearch/
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-enlartenment
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1

[enlartenment-sources]
name=Enlartenment Repository for $releasever - Sources
baseurl=http://www.enlartenment.com/packages/fedora/$releasever/SRPMS/
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-enlartenment
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1

Next, we import that repository's GPG key:

rpm --import http://www.enlartenment.com/RPM-GPG-KEY.mf

 

3 Install Postfix, Courier, Saslauthd, MySQL, phpMyAdmin

This can all be installed with one single command:

yum install ntp httpd mysql-server php php-mysql php-mbstring rpm-build gcc mysql-devel openssl-devel cyrus-sasl-devel pkgconfig zlib-devel maildrop courier-imap courier-authlib-mysql phpmyadmin pcre-devel openldap-devel

When you see this:

warning: rpmts_HdrFromFdno: Header V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 4f2a6fd2
Public key for ntp-4.2.0.a.20050816-11.FC5.i386.rpm is not installed
Retrieving GPG key from file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora
Importing GPG key 0x4F2A6FD2 "Fedora Project <[email protected]>"
Is this ok [y/N]:

please answer with y.

 

4 Apply Quota Patch To Postfix

We have to get the Postfix source rpm, patch it with the quota patch, build a new Postfix rpm package and install it.

cd /usr/src
wget http://ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de/pub/Mirrors/fedora/linux/core/5/source/SRPMS/postfix-2.2.8-1.2.src.rpm
rpm -ivh postfix-2.2.8-1.2.src.rpm
cd /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES
wget http://web.onda.com.br/nadal/postfix/VDA/postfix-2.2.8-vda.patch.gz
gunzip postfix-2.2.8-vda.patch.gz
cd /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/

Now we must edit the file postfix.spec:

vi postfix.spec

Change %define MYSQL 0 to %define MYSQL 1, add Patch0: postfix-2.2.8-vda.patch to the # Patches stanza, and finally add %patch0 -p1 -b .vda to the %setup -q stanza:

[...]
%define MYSQL 1
[...]
# Patches

Patch0: postfix-2.2.8-vda.patch
Patch1: postfix-2.1.1-config.patch
Patch3: postfix-alternatives.patch
Patch4: postfix-hostname-fqdn.patch
Patch6: postfix-2.1.1-obsolete.patch
Patch7: postfix-2.1.5-aliases.patch
Patch8: postfix-large-fs.patch
Patch9: postfix-2.2.5-cyrus.patch
[...]
%setup -q
# Apply obligatory patches
%patch0 -p1 -b .vda
%patch1 -p1 -b .config
%patch3 -p1 -b .alternatives
%patch4 -p1 -b .postfix-hostname-fqdn
%patch6 -p1 -b .obsolete
%patch7 -p1 -b .aliases
%patch8 -p1 -b .large-fs
%patch9 -p1 -b .cyrus
[...]

Then we build our new Postfix rpm package with quota and MySQL support:

rpmbuild -ba postfix.spec

You will see lots of warnings like these that you can ignore:

msg.h:12:1: warning: "/*" within comment
msg.h:14:1: warning: "/*" within comment
msg.h:33:1: warning: "/*" within comment
msg.h:34:1: warning: "/*" within comment
msg.h:35:1: warning: "/*" within comment
msg.h:36:1: warning: "/*" within comment

Our Postfix rpm package is created in /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386, so we go there and install it:

cd /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386
rpm -ivh postfix-2.2.8-1.2.i386.rpm

(In case you have problems creating the Postfix rpm package, you can download mine from here.)

 

5 Set MySQL Passwords And Configure phpMyAdmin

Start MySQL:

chkconfig --levels 235 mysqld on
/etc/init.d/mysqld start

Then set passwords for the MySQL root account:

mysqladmin -u root password yourrootsqlpassword
mysqladmin -h server1.example.com -u root password yourrootsqlpassword

Now we configure phpMyAdmin. Create /usr/share/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php:

vi /usr/share/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php
<?php
$cfg[PmaAbsoluteUri] = 'http://192.168.0.100/phpmyadmin/';
$i=0;
$i++;
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type']          = 'http';
?>

Then we change the Apache configuration so that phpMyAdmin allows connections not just from localhost:

vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/phpmyadmin.conf
Alias /phpmyadmin/ "/usr/share/phpmyadmin/"
#<Location "/phpmyadmin/">
#        Order allow,deny
#       Allow from 127.0.0.1
#</Location>

Then we create the system startup links for Apache and start it:

chkconfig --levels 235 httpd on
/etc/init.d/httpd start

Now you can direct your browser to http://server1.example.com/phpmyadmin/ and log in with the user name root and your new root MySQL password.

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