DNS, Sendmail and Building Linux

[problem]

Have been aware of DNS and sendmail for over 10 years, but never really dabbled.

[/problem]

[solution]

Hit a lot of issues, mainly with dodgy clients – like outlook (ended up moving over completely to mozilla’s thunderbird email client!). Also with port forwarding and firewall, default routes, etc.

To set it all up these were my steps:

1) Build RH Linux server with fedora core 4 (5 is out now too I think).
2) Ensure BIND was installed. yum is your friend! 🙂 Do yum –help as root.
3) Edit /etc/named.conf – add my zone file. Always make a bu: cp -i /etc/named.conf /etc/named.conf.$(date +%j)
4) Copied localdomain.zone to puterpet.zone # this domain is retired now. 🙂
5) Modified puterpet.zone to include my info: SOA (start of authority) – in my case I said zion.puterpet.com as this then relates to the ip of broadband router. Bit backward in logic, specify your DNS server with a name registered in your DNS server! 🙂 Then I created an A record and NS for zion; CNAME for www to zion and CNAME for mail; lastly an MX record for mail. I’ll happily supply my zone file if someone wants a peek. 🙂
6) Register domain name with www.domaincentral.com.au – $12.50 a year! 🙂 Give it the ip of my DNS server – which is actually the broadband router, with port 53 forwarded to my RH Linux box. domaincentral have been great (I’ve now got 3 domains with them). www.puterpet.com – this one www.techie-blogs.com and darlingranges.com (still setting this up).
7) Setup port forwarding on broadband router, then fire up named and it was all good. Setup up virtual hosts (www.puterpet.com and mail.puterpet.com) in that domain. Now can setup any mail account or host in that domain, it is just beautiful! 🙂
8) Installed/updated sendmail. Especially like watching sendmail’s incoming and outgoing messages. 🙂
9) Edit /etc/mail/sendmail.mc – which is a macro config file that gets fed into m4 (macro language). Had to update m4, etc as kept breaking during conversion.
10) Edited various other files under /etc/mail – such as relay_domains (allow email from puterpet.com, etc); aliases …
12) Installed dovecot – which services POP and SMTP requests.
13) Created some accounts to handle mail – sales; enquiries, etc.
14) Modified my apache confs to handle and redirectmatch to new domain.

[/solution]

[example]

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[reference]

[tags]sendmail, DNS, POP, SMTP, Red Hat Linux, Unix Coding School[/tags]

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