Qmail Guide has been updated
I finally updated the Qmail Guide after a long while. Since my last update there have been lots of additions and patches to Qmail and there is a lot of useful stuff out there. New anti-spam techniques such as Greylisting, SPF and SRS are being introduced to Qmail. I did not have much time, so none of these patches are incorporated into the guide.
Apache Install Guide Updated
The Apache Install Guide has been updated with the latest software releases. PHP4 option has now been removed - the guide is only for PHP5 in production environments. Hopefully other guides will be updated soon as well.
Qmail Quickstarter – Book Review
I have been using qmail for many years and put a lot of effort in keeping my Qmail Howto up to date. I haven't been making many changes to the guide, since qmail is one of those things that once installed, you can leave it running until the mail server is ready to be decommissioned. So, I go back and update the guide whenever I need to install qmail on a brand new server.
Anyway, I was recently approached by Packt Publishing and they requested me to review their newly released book titled "Qmail Quickstarter" by Kyle Wheeler. I received the book in mail within a week or two after I agreed to review it and decided to check it out over the weekend - here is a very short review of the book.
Despite the fact that qmail is the second most popular MTA on the Internet, there are not that many good books on qmail out there. So, it was exciting to review an addition to the short list of qmail literature. In about 130 pages, the author covers everything from compiling and installing qmail to important patches, qmail configuration and monitoring. The book is easy to read for those who are familiar with *nix, so it is definitely a good reference for mail administrators. There is plenty of information on qmail and third party addons (including vpopmail and VMailMgr) and the author does a good job in explaining basic qmail functionality. However, I felt that the book was a little incomplete, because many topics are touched upon, but not in enough detail. For example, in Chapter 6 "Filtering", the author mentions the most popular anti-virus engines, but does not show how to hook any of them up to qmail. In all honesty, it is a little misleading to call it a "step-by-step" guide, because it is not detailed enough to be called that. Personally, I would rename it to something like "Qmail Reference Guide". At the same time, I also understand that putting too many details into such book would make it hard to read and follow, especially with qmail, since it is NOT a simple or intuitive program to learn.
Overall, I really enjoyed reading the book and I can say that it definitely deserves a spot in a system administrator's bookshelf.
Apache Guide has been updated
Just updated the "Apache, PHP, GD & Mod_Perl Guide" for the latest versions of Apache (1.3.39) and PHP (5.2.4). Compiled it on this server and so far everything has been running great! :)
Guide updates
The following guides have been modified to work with the latest updates:
Apache Install Guide
Russian GD 2.0.33 Guide
Apache Performance Guide
Linux VPN Guide
The Linux VPN Guide went through a lot of modifications. I updated the patches to compile on Fedora Core 4 and Debian Linux. Installed and tested on a brand new box and it worked perfectly! :) I will be modifying the Qmail Guide soon, so stay tuned!
Linux VPN Guide
Linux VPN Guide will help you to create a Linux-based VPN server which can be accessed from any Windows client (primarily Windows XP, but can be extended to work with older Windows operating systems such as Windows 2000 or 95/98/NT). I wrote this guide because of the pain I went through to get VPN up and running at my work. After a couple of days of struggling and heavy debugging I was able to set up a VPN server on Fedora Core 2 and 3 with latest updates. I decided that VPN installation should not be such a nightmare and tried to make everything as simple as possible in this guide.
Guide Updates
The following guides have been updated:
- Russian GD 2.0.28 Guide - LZW patent has been expired and Thomas Boutell released a new version of GD with GIF support! This is great news, because you can generate GIF images with GD without having to patch it. I have updated the guide with the latest versions of programs and new instructions.
- Apache Install Guide - Updated the guide with the latest versions of software, including the new PHP 5.0.1 version. PHP release 5 is now officially dubbed "stable" and you should upgrade asap.
- Qmail Howto - A lot of updates to this guide - some parts were completely rewritten. Now instead of using qmail sources, we'll be using netqmail 1.05. I have reviewed all the patches and added some new ones for security and other reasons. The new patches are: big-ext-todo (combines big-todo and ext-todo), doublebounce-trim, mfcheck-4 (updated from mfcheck-3), smtpd-relay-reject, antispoofing, accept-5xx and nullenvsender. A detailed description of what each patch does is in the guide. New versions of Courier-IMAP, Maildrop, SpamAssassin and Qmail-Scanner came out since my last update, so I modified the howto as needed. I have installed qmail with the new guide on a brand new Fedora Core 2 setup and it worked like a charm!
Apache Bandwidth Throttling
This guide is written mostly for web administrators/developers, who want to control the bandwidth usage of their web resources. Especially in hosting environments, where bandwidth usage is very important, it's vital that one resource does not eat up all of the available server bandwidth.
Russian GD 2.0.33 Guide
I wrote this guide for those people, who would like to print cyrillic letters in GD. Since native GD fonts do not support Cyrillic characters, the only way to print out Cyrillic on GD is to use TrueType fonts. If you are using GD very often, using ttf is not the best and speedy solution. TrueType fonts do require more memory, time and CPU usage for producing an image in GD, whereas native GD fonts take up a lot less memory and time, because they are already compiled into GD.
Russian GD 1.8.4 Guide
This guide is for those people, who would like to print Cyrillic letters in GD. Since native GD fonts do not support Cyrillic characters, the only way to print out Cyrillic on GD is to use TrueType fonts. If you are using GD very often, using TTF is not the best and speedy solution. TrueType fonts do require more memory, time and CPU usage for producing an image in GD, whereas native GD fonts take up a lot less memory and time, because they are already compiled into GD.
