Mon, 16 Mar 2009
Marvelously Modified Mailserver
Geeky Fun!
After spending a whole week of classroom time in a “System p LPAR and Virtualization I: Planning and Configuration” training session, this weekend I was feeling motivated to make a few changes. As I’d been deferring the (completely unrelated) migration of my email and SSH server to a new platform, it was time to take action!
This is a relatively large change for my small environment. Currently, I’m running a web server (Apache), a mail server (Postfix with SpamAssassin), a remote access server (SSH), Windows (Samba) and Unix (NFS) networking servers, some monitoring utilities (Monit), and various smaller functional programs.
Fortunately, the migration process was to be relatively painless. As I had planned for this, I already had mirrored the configuration from my “Old and Busted” system (based on an Intel Pentium III running at 800 MHz, and although rock solid, dreadfully slow), to the “New and Kewl” system (based on an Intel Xeon dual core, dual processor running at 2.3 GHz). All that needed to be done, then, was:
- At the router, stop accepting inbound email for the duration of the migration.
- Disable the Postfix daemon on OldAndBusted.
- Copy the user mailboxes from OldAndBusted to NewAndKewl.
- At the router, set inbound email connections to be directed to NewAndKewl.
And that should do it!
Except for the small item of ensuring that my users’ individual email clients are all configured to talk to NewAndKewl instead of OldAndBusted. Not a problem! I use DNS for my internal network, so I updated the DNS configuration to point mail.hallmarc.net at NewAndKewl, and everything was good.
Except the email clients were using the IP address rather than the fully-qualified domain name for the mail server. Uh. Dumb. Ah! but I can modify the configuration from the command line for all the kids accounts by logging in remotely and changing all of Thunderbird’s instances of OldAndBusted’s IP to NewAndKewl’s IP. Done and done. (Yes, I did have to use the GUI on my wife’s Windows XP PC to do this. One more reason not to support Windows.)
About using that GUI… Apparently my wife for months had been clicking through a dialog box every time she collected email. The dialog indicated that the mail server’s SSL/TLS certificates had expired. I only learned this because, yup, I used the GUI to change her server setting. So now I needed to update my server certs. Which will be the subject of my next blog entry.
posted at: 19:33 | permanent link to this entry
Marc Elliot Hall St. Peters, Missouri
Page created: 21 January 2002
Page modified: 31 December 2009
