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Xref: sserve comp.os.linux:44670 comp.os.386bsd.questions:3213 Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!network.ucsd.edu!news.cerf.net!nic.cerf.net!preston From: preston@nic.cerf.net (Preston L. Bannister) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux,comp.os.386bsd.questions Subject: Setting up a server for InterNet mail/news? Date: 23 Jun 1993 00:26:47 GMT Organization: Upstanding Systems Lines: 94 Distribution: world Message-ID: <208807$1b0@news.cerf.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: nic.cerf.net I am looking to setup an InterNet mail/news server for our company's network of PC's. I'm looking of hints from anyone how has done something similar... Also I had the basic question about whether 386BSD or Linux is the better starting point... Our connection to the InterNet is a SLIP dial-in to nic.cerf.net. The PC's are all running DOS/Windows. We have a box in the back room running 386BSD. In my (limited) spare time I've: 1. Applied for and received a domain name (upstanding.com). 2. Configured the network software on the 386BSD box with the help of the Nutshell book on "TCP/IP Network Administration". The 386BSD box "knows" about the other boxes on the local network, and will (in theory!) packets to/from the InterNet over the SLIP connection. (Static routing only, but our net is small...) 3. Manually established a SLIP connection to the InterNet, and run telnet and ftp over the SLIP link. 4. Grabbed Pegasus and Charon, and installed Pegasus on our Novell NetWare file server. This was all months ago... (funny, how your software going into Beta can use all your time :-) Questions remaining: 0. Whether to use 386BSD or Linux as a starting point. I had a lot of incidental trouble with missing or non-working utilities when setting up the 386BSD network config (no "man -k" was pretty painful too :-). I had downloaded and applied the patchkits up to 0.2.2 and added the com-driver patches. Now I can't dial out at all... :-( Looks like it's time to start over. Do I start over with 386BSD + patches, NetBSD, or Linux. At first glance, Linux appears to be better organized and documented. Maybe it even works better... :-) 1. How to automatically establish the SLIP dial-in. Actually I may have "discovered" a simple solution. At one point someone suggested I use kermit, which I ignored since I thought they were talking about using kermit interactively. I've since found the dialup-slip package which seems to consist mostly of kermit scripts(!). I didn't know kermit supported scripts... :-) I also grabbed the tcl/expect sources, but didn't have the time to figure out why they wouldn't compile. (Doubtless _someone_ has ported them to 386BSD). 2. Setup to exchange mail when connected. Both when the connection is first made (much like via uucp?) and in "real-time" during the day as mail is sent and arrives. 3. Setup to exchange news when connected. This is probably pretty standard News setup, much like getting News over a uucp link? 4. Choose the appropriate software for the PCs to get InterNet mail and read news. I grabbed "popper" to try using the 386BSD box as a mail server with QVTnet, but never actually got a connection. In theory with Pegasus and Charon I can get mail forwarded to and from the InterNet (although a Windows version of Pegasus would be nice...) Real time notification of arriving mail is important. Maybe we could put Windows for Workgroups on all the PC's and use Microsoft Mail? LOTS of questions... :-) I'm not looking for detailed instructions, just (a) have you done this, and (b) what did you use. Enough to get started in the right direction. This seems like good material for a FAQ... -- Preston L. Bannister Upstanding Systems preston@cerf.net