Book Image

Linux Email

Book Image

Linux Email

Overview of this book

Many businesses want to run their email servers on Linux for greater control and flexibility of corporate communications, but getting started can be complicated. The attractiveness of a free-to-use and robust email service running on Linux can be undermined by the apparent technical challenges involved. Some of the complexity arises from the fact that an email server consists of several components that must be installed and configured separately, then integrated together. This book gives you just what you need to know to set up and maintain an email server. Unlike other approaches that deal with one component at a time, this book delivers a step-by-step approach across all the server components, leaving you with a complete working email server for your small business network. Starting with a discussion on why you should even consider hosting your own email server, the book covers setting up the mail server. We then move on to look at providing web access, so that users can access their email out of the office. After this we look at the features you'll want to add to improve email productivity: virus protection, spam detection, and automatic email processing. Finally we look at an essential maintenance task: backups. Written by professional Linux administrators, the book is aimed at technically confident users and new and part-time system administrators. The emphasis is on simple, practical and reliable guidance. Based entirely on free, Open Source software, this book will show you how to set up and manage your email server easily.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Linux E-mail
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface

Backing up configurations and logs


There are two approaches to the backup of configuration data and important log files.

  • Store the data on our backup media: Using this method, we will back up directly to our backup server.

  • Add the data to our backup schedule: This approach will include the necessary files as a part of our user data backup.

Either case is equally valid and is really a matter of personal preference.

As a reminder, earlier we made a list of the important parts of the system that require backup. These were:

Important part of the system

Example command

System inventory

disk_layout.txt

List of installed software

installed_software.txt

System configuration files

/etc

Authentication data

/etc/password /etc/groups /etc/shadow

Log files

/var/log

Mail queue

/var/spool/postfix

As each system is different, you should ensure that the example commands given next cover all the necessary files.

Transferring configurations and logs to backup media

To keep it simple...