Bye Bye Gentoo

After about 8 months powering my local server, I’ve decided to bid gentoo farewell. It’s a little bittersweet, I really like the idea of ebuilds and emerge and all that, but I’m committed to helping out the Fedora Core project and the best way I can do that, is by installing and testing it like crazy.

Currently mithrandir, the server in question, handles a few tasks:

1. Mail infrastructure, SMTP, IMAP and Webmail
2. Other web infrastructure, This site, plus a few bits and pieces
3. File server for internal use
4. Router, firewall & all that networky stuff.

I plan to move the servers to tharkun (my old desktop) one by one, and once everything is working, take a kickstart configuration then use it to install on mithrandir.

Hopefully tharkun will only have to run as a server for a day or two before I’m ready to cut back over to mithrandir.

Mail infrastructure

This is the job that I see as most important. I get a lot of mail, inbound SMTP connections are in the thousands most days. Now the bulk of it is spam, but I get about 200 emails a day, things like mailling lists and actual emails. On top of that I forward and store emails for friends and family.

The current system is Qmail + Courier IMAP + IMP. I intend to replace it with Postfix + dovecot + squirrelmail, mostly because they’re packaged in fedora. Initial tests of Postfix + dovecot seem to be going very well, it read the Maildir’s fine and my mail clients are interacting just fine.

Web infrastructure

Most of the sites on mithrandir are just static HTML or PHP, so the webmail solution will take care of all their difficulties. However I’d like to get jboss running as well with mod_proxy in the middle.

Fileserver

Just Samba and NFS sharing the same big directory to local clients, there should be no trouble here.

Router etc.

I’ll cut this over last, I have a simple iptables setup, just basic NAT and trusted IMAP hosts. I’ll probably not bother to install this on tharkun and just do without NAT while installing and testing mithrandir.

While I’m doing all this I’ll post any progress updates in this fedora category.

Update 2003-11-07

This is complete now.