Virtual Mailhosting System with Postfix Guide

ragarwal · n00b Joined: 21 Apr 2005 Posts: 20

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/virt-mail-howto.xml

This guid is so screwed up that it is beyond belief that it is still up on Gentoo Forums.

Spent countless number of hours fighting with this thing!!!! UUUUFFF.. I give up.

Is there a kind soul who could work with me on updating this documentation? I'd be willing to provide my experience and time to update it. I don't conplete understand all of postfix yet, so I need some guidance (minimal).

Thanks,
-Raj

steveb · Advocate Joined: 18 Sep 2002 Posts: 4564

I am willing to help you. What do you want to change?

tomxaak · n00b Joined: 28 Apr 2005 Posts: 5

the first problem is that the courier daemon is now using authlib, not authdaemon
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steveb · Advocate Joined: 18 Sep 2002 Posts: 4564

tomxaak · n00b Joined: 28 Apr 2005 Posts: 5

yes, this is exactly what I've already changed

btw. newer version of the howto can be found here:
http://www.etherpunk.com/node/232

but following these instructions, comparing with both
howtos, i got this problem:

<1000@mail.domainxyz.tld> (expanded from <myusername@domainxyz.tld>): unknown user: "1000"

1000 is uid of myusername. But this is the opposite of virtual hosts, no?
advantage of virtual hosts is in omitting usage of uids.

configuration files are set just like in the howto.

In the database I've:

id 1

email myusername@domainxyz.tld

clear somepassword

name blablabla local user

uid 1000

gid 100

homedir /home/vmail/domainxyz.tld/myusername

maildir /home/vmail/domainxyz.tld/myusername/.maildir

quota

postfix y

(domainxyz.tld and mail.domainxyz.tld have been replaced with valid domain with valid mx record of course and
myusername is valid system account with uid 1000 and gid 100)

tail /var/log/mail/current

May 3 23:44:40 [postfix/pickup] 71DF476B3A: uid=0 from=<root>
May 3 23:44:40 [postfix/cleanup] 71DF476B3A: message-id=<20050503214440.GA4522@myhostname.domainxyz.tld>
May 3 23:44:40 [postfix/qmgr] 71DF476B3A: from=<root@mail.domainxyz.tld>, size=391, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
May 3 23:44:40 [postfix/local] 71DF476B3A: to=<1000@mail.domainxyz.tld>, orig_to=<myusername@domainxyz.tld>, relay=local, delay=0, status=bounced (unknown user: "1000")
May 3 23:44:40 [postfix/qmgr] 71DF476B3A: removed
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predisposition · n00b Joined: 30 Apr 2005 Posts: 23

steveb: thank you! I was trying to ask the same question earlier but didn't phrase it right -- this change helps me a ton!
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predisposition · n00b Joined: 30 Apr 2005 Posts: 23

tomxaak...

my set up is now working. Thanks for the link to the newer version of the tutorial -- that one has some better explanations... I have some questions for you regarding your last post...

-is this example user a virtual user? If so, is 1000 the vmail user id?
-in the maildir field you need a slash at the end: maildir /home/vmail/domainxyz.tld/myusername/.maildir/
-in addition to the mail log, check the /var/log/mail.err log to make sure that a proper connection is being made to the database -- I was getting the unknown user error for a while, then I realized I had a typo in my pam_mysql config files that was screwing up the db connection

These are just thoughts -- hth

Sam
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tomxaak · n00b Joined: 28 Apr 2005 Posts: 5

in fact, I've tried both cases,
existing valid system user and virtual user.

in the case of virtual user:
1) 1000 is the uid of user vmail
2) slash at the end of the path, fixed, nothing has been changed
3) the connection to the db must be working because the system was able to translate the myusername@domainxyz.tld to 1000@dmainxyz.tld, and only record that myusername is mapped to the uid 1000 is in the db

in the case of existing valid system user:
1) 1000 is the uid of system user, not vmail user
2) ..
3) ..
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predisposition · n00b Joined: 30 Apr 2005 Posts: 23

is 1000 just a made up number here for example's sake? I'm confused how the system user and the vmail user could both have the same uid... Are there any messages at all in the mail error log?
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thank you gentoo community!

tomxaak · n00b Joined: 28 Apr 2005 Posts: 5

given uids have been generated only for this example of course, in real they are different.
system users have different uid than vmail user. uids of virtual users are mapped to vmail user.

log:

May 5 16:39:50 [postfix/pickup] 52DCB76B3A: uid=0 from=<root>
May 5 16:39:50 [postfix/qmgr] 52DCB76B3A: from=<root@mail.domainxyz.tld>, size=387, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
May 5 16:39:50 [postfix/local] 52DCB76B3A: to=<1000@mail.domainxyz.tld>, orig_to=<myusername@domainxyz.tld>, relay=local, delay=0, status=bounced (unknown user: "1000")
May 5 16:39:50 [postfix/qmgr] 52DCB76B3A: removed

thats all I've in the log related to this email.
Postfix is trying to translate myusername to uid, and that is what I don't understand yet.
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predisposition · n00b Joined: 30 Apr 2005 Posts: 23

What do you have in the other mysql tables (besides user)? Is there something in the relocated or virtual table that could be causing this? Also, are you sure the fields are properly identified in the the /etc/postfix/mysql* files? In my set up, I don't have anything in the virtual or relocated tables... I've got three domains. They are all identified as "virtual:" in the transport table, one of my users does have system account, two other test accounts do not and they each work fine. I'm just trying to think what might be different from your installation and mine... do you have separate mail logs? On my system there is "mail.log", "mail.info", "mail.err" and "mail.warn" -- all in /var/log/ -- the useful stuff for me is in mail.err
_________________
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thank you gentoo community!

tomxaak · n00b Joined: 28 Apr 2005 Posts: 5

solved, my mistake

this was the problem (lame):

mysql-virtual.cf:select_field = uid

instead of

mysql-virtual.cf:select_field = destination

too many configuration files, I've checked all of them for 3 times at least, but this typo..

It was good at least for "forced" understading of how it works,
not just copy&paste from the howto

anyway tnx for your time & support
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o5gmmob8 · Guru Joined: 17 Oct 2003 Posts: 505

Hi guys,

I am running postfix and everything looks like it is working correctly - I can send emails authenticated correctly, but when I send emails to that user (the user is local, but in my mailsql database, I have it setup to be virtual) it puts it in that user's home directory/.maildir. I want all mail regardless if it is local to be put in /home/vmail/domain/user/.maildir so I can then read that email with squirrelmail or an IMAP client.

Is this possible - how do I completely remove local users and setup only virtual ones? Is this supposed to happen by default with the mailsql configuration?

So what I did now is change:

rsmereka · Posted: Fri May 06, 2005 3:16 pm Post subject:

I too have been battling with the guide for a couple of months now. I have had to come here to ask questions at times and I must say that even though the guide is very confusing, the community here is great and we end up learning alot. The last issue I had using the old guide was that no remote users were being authenticated. I took the advice of this post and modifed the config for the alternate guide at:
http://www.etherpunk.com/node/232
Here is what I am getting now:

rsmereka · Posted: Fri May 06, 2005 3:56 pm Post subject:

[solved] I found the problem. I needed to re-

o5gmmob8 · Guru Joined: 17 Oct 2003 Posts: 505

Hi,

Normally when you get those errors, it means that you have compiled in support for mysql authentication, but the library has since been removed. If you didn't have mysql during compilation, it would have removed support, and you wouldn't get that error message about the library being missing.

I would recommend that you look for both mysql and pam_mysql (via emerge -s), also make sure the latest version is installed.

I see you fixed the problem, I knew it was one of those packages.

Walter

o5gmmob8 · Guru Joined: 17 Oct 2003 Posts: 505

Hi,

I figured out my problem, so postfix has several options apparently. When doing virtual users, if the maildir in the mailsql database (or text file) has an ending slash: /home/vmail/domain/user/.maildir/, then the format of the mailbox is UNIX maildir. In my mailsql database, I did not have the trailing slash and it wanted to use the path as the location of the textfile for mbox format.

Walter

Nazadus · Posted: Thu May 26, 2005 2:43 pm Post subject:

I'm the orginal creator of etherpunnk and the person updating that page.
Here is the wiki page:

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Linux_Virtual_Hosting_Server

I bring this up becuase I'm updating my website and the node number won't be the same...

rprescott · n00b Joined: 09 Apr 2004 Posts: 16

Hi There,

I followed this guide exactly http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/virt-mail-howto.xml but, I have one problem virtual users are not getting their mail delieved to their mailbox while non-virtual users are?

This something with courier-imap and Im not sure what. But its driving me nutts any help would be great!

Thanks,
Rob

Nazadus · Posted: Thu Jun 09, 2005 3:14 am Post subject:

Could be any number of things.
Firstly, try running 'postconf -n' to get a list of all your variables.
Check for spelling.
If you believe the vars to be right (which, if you've never set this up before you don't really know... you just have to guess/hope) then the enxt thing to do is to add verbosity to your logs.
Open up /etc/postfix/master.cf
Lines are in a format like this: