Mike Ramchand's blog, covering mainly JET (Jumpstart Enterprise Toolkit), but with diversions into other stuff, like sailing.. JET Stream

I've diverted slightly from Chris Gerhard's home server implementation by deciding to NOT use the blastwave packages, and instead either use the sunfreeware stuff, or compile it myself.

I've got a few reasons for doing it this way:

1. Many of these packages have compile time options which allow me to include/exclude things. I kind of like the ability to be able to do that, rather than having to stick with the "defaults" compiled by someone else.
2. Using blastwave (which is really great) means that you need to install a bunch of "dependent" libraries. It just kind of irks me that a lot of the libraries/applications dependencies that I install are already sitting in /usr/sfw. I then start getting really confused, and run into complications about LD_LIBRARY_PATHs and making sure things are seeing the right library etc. I think it's difficult to use blastwave without sort of subscribing to it wholesale. It's a bit like buying a "kit car" fully assembled.
   
3. The sunfreeware stuff tries to make use of existing Solaris libraries as much as possible, so should reduce the number of additional packages I had to download.

Additional Software Installed on my home server:

From Blastwave:

• xineui (and whatever it needed to get that working.. about 81MB)
  

From Sunfreeware:

• imap-2004g-sol10-x86-local    (had manually update /etc/inetd.conf and run inetconv, then update /etc/services. Also need to generate a certificate as this is the SSL version, so wouldn't let me do plain text authentication.)
  
• openssl-0.9.8d-sol10-x86-local
• libiconv-1.9.2-sol10-x86-local
  

From CPAN:

• spamassissin

    (# perl -MCPAN -e 'install Mail::SpamAssassin' , download the dependents listed as well.)

From Source:

• Exim 4.63
• Clamav-0.88.6

Building Exim

Building Exim was pretty straightforward. Grab the tar.bz2, unzip, untar, copy src/EDITME to Local/Makefile. Edit the Makefile. It is well commented and lets you turn on/off options, specify where you want the spool, bin directory and config files to go. I created zfs filesystems for /usr/exim and /var/spool/exim. Also elected to make sure I had all the content scanning and TLS/SSL options turned ON. I've got Sun Studio 11 installed, and it used this complier when I ran the make. Then ran make install to stick everything in the right place.

Before actually running exim, I had to make sure that clamav and spamassassin were all up and running, so I got those to the point where the clamd and spamd daemons were running, then simply editted the /usr/exim/configure file to set things up.

Building Clamav

Clamav is cool because it has the "configure" script. So I ran it, it found everything it wanted, and then I ran make and it just compiled. Followed by "make install" to put it all in /usr/local (which is also a zfs filesystem).

Plugging it all in

I kind of cheated and hacked the /lib/svc/method/smtp-sendmail file. I did this because there are dependencies on sendmail which I need to maintain. I cheated a little bit more by having this same file star clamd, freshclam and spamd. It gives me less granularity of control, but the reality is that I usually manage all of these as a group anyway.

The other tiny problem I had was that spamd didn't honour the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable because bits of it are setuid. (Its a Solaris security thing). Anyway, this meant that I had to use crle to  make sure that all the apps had /usr/sfw/lib and /usr/local/lib in their paths.

In my next blog

I'll cover in some more detail the settings I used for exim, and the fun I had with outgoing SMTP e-mail.

tags: Solaris SUN X86