I've got a box running Fedora Core 2 in my garage and I use it as a general server/bittorrent client/file backup server, apache/php/mysql/postgresql server /garage music machine (Don't you just LOVE Linux ). I administer the lot over VNC from my XP machine.

Anyway, I use Outlook Express on XP and download email from my ISP directly into it, but I'd like to use PostFix on Linux to be an email server. That way I could get at the mail over the web or from any client in the house.

Anyone got any experience at it? I've looked at some stuff on the net and haven't got particularly far. Any of you splendid people got Sendmail/Postfix/Whatever email server experience? Am I asking the wrong question?

Cheers,
Neil.

VNC or it various forks and clones might not be the best way to go --- it is inherently slow because it requires the whole screen display to be sent over the network then redrawn in a window on the client and kept continuously refreshed -- because of this it is best regarded a teaching/demo tool.

Most of the Linux admin tasks you will want to do are command or text based and can be done better using a remote SSH login. I started using secure remote logins to install addons to my IPCop firewall -- the Windows software you want to look at is Putty, Cygwin and WinSCP.

WinSCP is particularly useful, I run a PureFTP server on my Yoper Linux PC to maintain mirrors of the documents directories on my Windows PCs and since installing this software I have found that I no longer have a need to run Samba Server . Scheduled backups are run using Cobian Backup on the Windows PCs with file transfer using FTP.

Be very aware that if you are exposing any servers to the web leaves you wide open to getting well and truly rodgered particularly if they are running on the the same PC, so you will need to be well up on creating chroot jails and firewalling and keep your server software security patches up to date. With a mail server you have to be particularly careful that your server is locked down tight and not acting as an open relay for spam.

For help on setting a Linux mail server & MTA just post on any of the Linux usenet groups or any general Linux forum and some kind soul will give you a skeleton config file you require. I took one look at running a home mailserver on Linux and decided it wasn't worth the effort until somebody writes a decent GUI configuration tool. An easier way to run a mail server is to run it on the Windows PC using Lansuite 602.

I assume you are runing static IP but you will also need to get your ISP to setup a reverse DNS entry for your domain as because of the open relay problem many ISP now reject mail from for which there is no reverse DNS entry.

I've got a 100 LAN at home and VNC works fine, even over a variable wireless link. It does make administration so much easier. I don't know what the performance would be over an Internet link, but that doesn't bother me as I'll probably never use it. TightVNC seems to do a good compression on the screen data and I only use plain backgrounds on the desktops.


I think security should be OK-ish as the outside conection's through a 3COM router with built in firewall. The Linux box is setup as a virtual server through the router and all the services I need have had their ports aliased through port-forwarding (even Apache's port 80)


For the email I was going to go directly through my ISP's SMTP connection as currently configured in Outlook Express. I wasn't going to be a email server "as-such"


I did try to compile Open-XChange which is meant to be a competitor to Microsoft Exchange and is now bundled with SuSE, but I've had so much trouble with bl00dy JavaSDK's that I've given up trying to compile it.


As far as config tools goes, have you seen webmin? http://www.webmin.com/

There are configuration options in that for Postfix and Sendmail but was still on the gobbeldy-gook side.

Have you tried a Windows->Linux VPN such as that from OpenVPN?

Cheers,

Neil.