December 2003
Beginner
278 pages
10h 47m
English
Content preview from Postfix: The Definitive GuideBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Installation
After you have successfully compiled Postfix, you are ready to install it. You will have to be the root user in order to perform the installation steps.
You need to create a dedicated account that will own the Postfix queue and most of its processes. The account should not permit logins and does not need a shell or a home directory. Use your normal administrative tools to create an account. You can set the password to * and its home directory and shell to invalid paths (something like /bin/false or /dev/null). By convention the username should be postfix. The entry in /etc/passwd should resemble the following:
postfix:*:1001:1001:postfix:/no/where:/bin/false
You must also create a dedicated group that is not used by any user account, including the postfix account you just created. By convention the group name is postdrop. On most systems you create groups be editing the /etc/group. Add a line like the following:
postdrop:*:1007:
Remember that Postfix is a replacement for Sendmail, and in order to maintain compatibility it installs its own sendmail binary in place of your existing one. You may want to rename the existing one to save it from being overwritten. Depending on your platform your existing sendmail is commonly in /usr/sbin/sendmail or /usr/lib/sendmail. You should be able to determine the exact location of your sendmail by executing:
# whereis sendmailThis may list a number of files. You are looking for the binary that has no extension. Once you have found it, rename ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.