New server.

2006 July 30 at 08:23 » Tagged as :qmail, broadband,

The server that's hosting this site has reached the retirement age. The old server is an AMD 2.4+ with 1Gig of ram and two hard drives. the new one will be a P4 3.2 with the same amount of RAM and drives.

Getting a new server always means having to install a lot of software. The operating system that drives the server is CentOs and it does have a lot of packages already installed. Some of these though will have to be uninstalled and replaced with better ones. In some cases (apache and PHP) the same software will be used but they will be compiled by hand.

One of the packages that need replacing is sendmail. qmail is the obvious choice for the SMTP. qmail does have it's own POP server but POP is hardly ever used. Even so inspite of my reservations, vpopmail is going to be installed. That is because managing virtual hosting with just .qmail files is a real pain.

An IMAP server is also needed, a long time ago I used to swear by Washington University IMAP, then later I used courier but of lately Binc has been the IMAP server of choice. Binc has it's own quirks which makes it rather annoying at times but I couldn't find anything better so it has to come on board as well.