I know I haven’t updated in awhile but I’ve been busy with work and at home I’ve been finishing up my new CentOS server. I finished moving the mail over along with ASSP, I’ve also finished with the DNS server and DHCP (this was a pain getting dynamic dns updates to work). Pretty soon I will be retiring my old Win2k server, I’ve found a solution for WSUS, run a virtual machine with Win2k and WSUS running for my automatic updates. I’m going to do away with active directory completely.

If you might have noticed I’ve updated my blog software to Wordpress. So far I really like the ability to add new functionality without having to hack into the php code. The admin interface is also alot more intuitive.

I was recently having some issues with my blog server software but after reinstalling everything is just fine now. My email server was down for a little while lately as well. I was making sure that my emails I recieved and sent would be virus free. I was using clawin for my virus scanner. It just had a little issue with it not wanting to scan the emails in the temporary folder. Also I finished writing a little script to keep my internet connection up. If when my server runs the script and it can’t ping some well known stable address then it reboots my dsl router. So now I shouldn’t be given a problem with down time anymore.

I recently installed and finished setting up SquirrelMail. I thought it might be helpful for some if I wrote a guide for installing and maintaining squirrelmail.
The first thing you’ll need are the latest version of Squirrelmail (I’ll refer to this by SM from now on) which at the time of writing was 1.5.1 was the latest development build and the only one that currently works with PHP v. 5 which I had installed earlier for the purposes of this blog.
Later I will publish a guide for installing PHP. The next thing you need is an IMAP capable server (I’m using hMailServer). Then since I installed SM on a windows 2000 server, I needed a copy of PERL (not necessary because you can edit the config by hand but just makes life easier). The first thing you want to do is unzip the SM files to a location outside of your inetpub folder for security reasons. Then you will want to create a virtual directory under IIS, make sure that this directory is writable because you will be uploading data to SM.

After that you want to run the PERL script located in SM under the config folder named conf.pl. Just go through all the options changing them to suit your needs. The main ones to pay attention to are the ones concerning the type of IMAP server you have and where the server is if it’s not located on the same machine. After getting everything configured you should try logging in. If your able to correctly login and receive and send mail congratulations you’ve setup SM.

The next thing you should do is search through the plugins section of SquirrelMail and find ones that would make you SM experience easier. The ones I recommend are the administrator plugin which allows you to remote access and change your config file. Also the admin_add plugin to easily add admins for the SM installation. I also activated the spam filters, calendar, newmail options, and the spell checker that are included in 1.5.1. A word on the Spell Check you will need another program in order for the spell check to work on windows. It’s called Aspell, there is a guide on installing Aspell for windows here under the windows section. After installing all the plugins that you needed, your SquirrelMail experience should be great.

I figured someone might be interested in the kind of server that I’m running. It’s an AMD XP 3000+ with 1.5 GB of Ram, 250 GB ATA 133 HD, 1Gbit NetGear NIC, and a CD-Rom drive. It was pieced together from a couple of my older computers when I recently upgraded my gaming computer. This is the third iteration of my server, one was temporary while switching from an older PC to the newer hardware

It’s currently running windows 2000 server with AD. I use IIS with FTP and Web services. I have PHP 5 installed along with MySql for use with my webmail. Which now I’m using squirrelmail exclusively with IholaMail as my backup. The email server is hMailserver a very good open source imap pop3 smtp server. The total cost of all this was the orginal price of the parts and the electricity to run it. Everything else was either free or I somehow obtained a copy of it.