Topic: Installing Bynari Mail Server and Insight Connector on E-Smi

[David Bakody]

For what ever it’s worth (which might not be much)… I’ve installed the Bynari Mail Server on one of my e-smith boxes.  I didn’t think it merited a formal How-To, but someone searching through the archives might find this information helpful.  That’s why I’m posting it here.


Installing the Bynari Mail Server in a brute-force manner might not be an ideal solution for everyone, since it basically castrates most of the useful services that e-smith normally provides.  However, if you’re like me and have plenty of cheap hardware laying around, installing the free Bynari Mail Server on an E-Smith box to provide Microsoft Exchange-Like services to your internal organization might be just the ticket you need at this instant (we just nearly purchased SBS2000 until discovering Bynari Insight Connector at the last minute).

To install the Bynari Mail Server on my e-smith box, I did the following:

Downloaded and installed the services-control panel.

http://www.e-smith.org/contrib/rpm-index/RPM-e-smith-service-control-1.1.0-01.src.html

I used the above control panel to turn off most of the e-smith services that conflict with Bynari – which means most of the fun stuff like smtp, imap, ldap, web, and so on.

Turning off web serving via the control panel doesn’t mean you won’t be able to access or administer e-smith box, just that now you’ll have to use www.yourdomain.xxx:980 instead of www.yourdomain.xxx/e-smith-manager.  Going to [your e-smith ip-address] bring up the Bynari Mail Server administration page instead.

After turning everything off I rebooted just to be safe.

I downloaded the Bynari Mail Server tar file to an available ibay, from which point I installed it, which is a pretty simple process.

Untar it by “tar –zxf mailserver”

“cd mailserver-1”

“./setup”

Answer questions or accept defaults.  Be careful when scrolling through the license acceptance screen, because if you’re not careful you’ll miss the last line wherein you MUST type “OK” to begin the installation.  If you [RETURN] through everything to quickly, you’ll miss it and have to “./setup” all over again.

Reboot.  Enjoy.


I admit it’s not a very good solution, it’s brute-force, breaks most everything but SAMBA, but IS useful if you are only going to use this particular e-smith box for this purpose only (until smarter people than yours truly come along and develop a more graceful solution or implement ACL on the existing e-smith box).

[David Bakody]

One thing I probably should have mentioned:

This setup is easily corrupted and/or clobbered.  If you enable cgi on any of your ibays, or basically touch anything after installing Bynari remotely web-related, it seems to definitely mess things up with the Bynari Mail Server.

Sorry.  Like I said, it's a definite kludge and not for the faint of heart.

[Andrei]

Just a curious question. Why not just install Bynari on a different free distribution of let's say Suse or Mandrake linux? (the easiest to manage and use of all linux installs) Drop it on your network and Bam! a solid mail server that's not sensitive to change and not having to break the e-smith install.