At the last ovsage meeting, two of us installed Linux into virtual machines, then installed postfix into those virtual machines. One of us managed to get his postfix working, so that someone else present could send him an email.

In my case, I had already installed DSL (Damn Small Linux) into VirtualBox. During the meeting, I upgraded DSL to Debian and installed postfix. But, I was using NAT for networking, and that did not allow for external machines to talk to my mail server.

Bruce however, installed Cent/OS 4 into VMWare on his Windows box - then installed postfix on that, and Scott was able to send him an email by the end of the evening.

To convert DSL to Debian, select from the root window menu:

• use gnu utils (ie, replace busybox with individual gnu utilities)
• install apt packaging

A quick look at DSL before the conversion showed that it was using fluxbox for its window manager (rather than using a bloated desktop like gnome or kde). I was interested to note that fluxbox uses the lua script language for extension.

One issue I ran into while upgrading DSL to Debian, was that I created an account for myself and gave myself a password, but the password was saved into /etc/passwd instead of /etc/shadow. The command to move it over to the right place is pwconv. The command to move the group passwords from /etc/group to /etc/gshadow is grpconv.

The debian package for postfix is called, not surprisingly, “postfix”. The documentation for it is in postfix-doc, though. Basic documentation for postfix in /usr/share/doc/postfix/BASIC_CONFIGURATION_README.gz. Scott also put up the url http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PostFix_Howto, but the postfix stuff is mixed up with some other stuff on that page.

It turns out all Bruce had to do was change one line in /etc/postfix/main.cf - and it worked. I’m keen to see Bruce’s notes : - )

To check postfix config: postfix check
To run postfix on a Debian system (after configuring): /etc/init.d/postfix start
On Debian, you can have a /etc/default/postfix but I’m not sure what you put in it.

Bruce had a tough time installing a Linux (any Linux) onto his machine - maybe he’ll blog about it.