Elite Frontier

If you maintain various virtual domains on a Debian Lenny box you can use Apple’s mail.app to access each virtual domain so you can send/receive e-mail as different users on those virtual domains. I use mail.app to access many virtual domains, on a daily basis and it works pretty well. This short article, describes how to set up the server correctly.

Install Courier with IMAP and IMAP SSL. If you want to be somewhat secure, only install the courier-imap-ssl. When you are prompted if you want to set up the web configuration directories, select NO.

apt-get install courier-imap courier-imap-ssl

If you are running mailx, you’ll need to install the mailbox conversion program

apt-get install  mb2md

Create the Courier mail directory, using maildirmake

su - myuser
cd /home/myuser
maildirmake Maildir

Convert the contents of the current mbox to the Maildir

su - myuser
mb2md -s /home/myuser/mbox -d /home/myuser/Maildir

For future incoming e-mail, let the email go into mbox, but put a copy into Maildir, create a .procmailrc with the following:

MAILDIR=$HOME/Maildir
:0c 
$MAILDIR/

I’ve noticed that every few weeks the Linksys Router will inconsistently route traffic to and from the VMware servers. The only way to resolve this is to reboot the router. This is very annoying since any hope for a stable PPTP session from the Internet is completely toast because the Linksys won’t forward packets to the VMware servers.

From time to time, I do server-side adminstration, as well as software development and testing. To do this efficiently, I have set up a two server VMware installation.

Each VMware Server consists of the following hardware:

• CPU: AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4800+ at 2.5 Mhz
• RAM: 8 GB
• Hard Drive: 150GB Raptor 10k RPM SATA
• Motherboard: ASUS M2A-VM

To build each server, I used the following media:

• Ubuntu-8.0.4-server-amd64.iso
• VMware Server 1.0.5
• vmware-any-any-update-116.tar
• VMware-server-1.0.5-80187.tar.gz

The Instructions are simple enough:

• install Ubuntu server
• sudo aptitude install build-essential linux-kernel-devel linux-headers-generic xinetd ia32-libs linux-headers-server
• install vmware server: When it asks to run vmware-config.pl, answer “no”
• install vmware-any-any-116: When it asks to run vmware-config.pl, answer “yes”
• Install bridge networking when prompted

The two VMware servers are named “alpha” and “beta”. The “alpha” server is configured to host different workstation instances and the “beta” server is configured to host different server instances.