No pain no gain

I am currently in the process of upgrading my webserver to Debian Etch. In the past I have been using Debian Sarge with Plesk as an administration desktop. Plesk is very convenient, but it is also a memory hog and a performance killer, so I decided to go on without a web based administration tool and configure every service manually. This has the advantage that the system will be more secure and easier to update. The downside is a little bit more work in the beginning. During the next couple of postings I will document the configuration of the various services I have running on that server.

In this first post I will start with the mail service for which I choose the Postfix daemon together with policyd-weight for spam filtering and Dovecot as an IMAP and POP3 server. Authentication will be done with the SASL daemon against the standard user database. This is not really suited for large mail installations with a lot of users, but if you have to deal with only a couple of mail users, it is really easy to administrate.

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