[Techtalk] Home server - Where to start?

Maria McKinley maria at shadlen.org
Thu May 5 23:39:32 UTC 2011


On 5/5/11 4:05 PM, Kathryn Andersen wrote:
> On Thu, May 05, 2011 at 05:15:01PM +0200, Svenja S. wrote:
>> Anyway, we've just bought an EEEbox that we're planning to use as a home
>> server and for multimedia (and to play around a bit...). Not sure
>> whether that is such a great idea, but I didn't pay for the thing...
>> I've been using Arch Linux for a while, so this is what I'd like to
>> install on the machine. But I don't have any experience in running a
>> server, so do you have any suggestions how I could get an idea of what
>> could be done with this thing and how?
>
> Well, one of the advantages of Arch Linux is that they do have good
> documentation, so looking there would be a good start.
>
>> First, we would like to run a file server, plus I've always wanted my
>> own mail server, but that will have to wait until I really know what I'm
>> doing ;)
>
> Whatever you choose for a mailserver, *don't* use sendmail; it is really
> hard to configure.  I use Postfix myself, but that doesn't mean that
> Postfix is the only easy mailserver.

Or that it is an easy mailserver. ;-) I would claim that it is only easy 
relative to sendmail. I think easy mailserver is a bit of an oxymoron. 
Or more precisely, a working mail service is not easy to achieve. The 
mail server is only part of the puzzle, there is also mail storage, 
security, spam filters, webmail (if desired), etc. Not to be 
discouraging, but realistically, it does take tenacity to setup a mail 
server.

~maria

>
> If you want to set up webmail as well, I suggest Dovecot for the IMAP
> server and roundcube for the webmail - though Squirrelmail is also good
> for webmail, roundcube looks prettier (grin).
>


More information about the Techtalk mailing list