[nzlug] Ftp and mail server

[Michal Ludvig]

Sid Bachtiar wrote:
> Ok, that makes sense.
> 
> Regarding of email server, do I need to own a static IP first to make it
> work?

Just some friendly advices as apparently you don't have much experience
with networking.

- Install the services on a machine in a protected network behind a
firewall and play with it for some time locally. Don't open the server
to the wild public internet until you gain some more confidence on what
it's all about.

- Set up a firewall and open only selected incoming ports. What incoming
ports to open depends on the services you want to provide to the
internet. I don't know what's the preferred firewall configuration tool
in Ubuntu but I believe there is one.

- Don't set your mailserver as incoming for all your mails until you
really know you've got the configuration right. It can easily start
rejecting or dropping emails if its not accurately configured. At the
beginning use it as outgoing only and observe carefully if it works as
expected.

- Also note that some ISPs may block SMTP traffic on their ADSL links.
AFAIK Xtra does, at least for egress traffic. If you're with Xtra you'll
need to let your mailserver know it must use a smarthost for sending out
the mails.

- As for FTP / SFTP / ... - do you need it for uploading stuff from
outsite? If not and you only want to provide read-only data to the
internet consider a webserver instead (e.g. Apache).

- And as usually the less services you run the better. I guess you don't
need most of the above internet facing services if any at all.

Michal