OpenSUSE As an Enterprise Email Server

English Network/Internet
#1

Hi All,

I’m very new to the OpenSUSE platform and wanted to seek you advice on a few burning questions I have about OpenSUSE.

Is OpenSUSE Capable of working as an Enterprise IMAP/POP3/SMTP Server?
Is OpenSUSE Capable of working as an Enterprise MySQL Database Server?
Is IMAP/POP3/SMTP Server capabilities already present in OpenSUSE or do I have to download it seperately?

#2

Personal opinion:

  1. Yes.
  2. Yes.
  3. Yes, but you’ll have to do a little work to get it acting the way you want. It can be done, though.

We ran the Scalix community edition on Opensuse 10.2 for a year and a half. We’re on CentOS now, and it’s a great distro, but I miss Yast. :slight_smile:

#3

On Fri February 20 2009 10:26 pm, smpoole7 wrote:

>
> chongchian;1947339 Wrote:
>> (numbers added by me):
>> > > >
> > 1. Is OpenSUSE Capable of working as an Enterprise IMAP/POP3/SMTP
> > Server?
> > 2. Is OpenSUSE Capable of working as an Enterprise MySQL Database
> > Server?
> > 3. Is IMAP/POP3/SMTP Server capabilities already present in
> > OpenSUSE or do I have to download it seperately?
> > > >
>
> Personal opinion:
>
> 1. Yes.
> 2. Yes.
> 3. Yes, but you’ll have to do a little work to get it acting the way
> you want. It can be done, though.
>
> We ran the Scalix community edition on Opensuse 10.2 for a year and a
> half. We’re on CentOS now, and it’s a great distro, but I miss Yast. :slight_smile:
>
>
chongchian;
IMAP/POP3/SMTP are usually not installed by default but there are are a number
of packages on the DVD and/or Repositories that provide these services. Use
YAST->Software Management to install.

P. V.
“We’re all in this together, I’m pulling for you.” Red Green

#4

chongchian wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I’m very new to the OpenSUSE platform and wanted to seek you advice on
> a few burning questions I have about OpenSUSE.
>
>
> Is OpenSUSE Capable of working as an Enterprise IMAP/POP3/SMTP
> Server?

No. Well… I mean yes… but only for a short period of time. Then
you’ll have to upgrade. If there are any bugs, you may have to wait
until the next VERSION of openSUSE (Enterprises frown on things like that).

> Is OpenSUSE Capable of working as an Enterprise MySQL Database
> Server?

See above.

> Is IMAP/POP3/SMTP Server capabilities already present in OpenSUSE or
> do I have to download it seperately?

It’s there. Multiple choices. Dovecot is easy to setup… but
that’s not what SUSE Enterprise uses (just fyi). Postfix is
very capable and pretty much has the majority of the Linux
SMTP market.

#5

cjcox wrote:
> chongchian wrote:
>> Hi All,
>>
>> I’m very new to the OpenSUSE platform and wanted to seek you advice on
>> a few burning questions I have about OpenSUSE.
>>
>>
>> Is OpenSUSE Capable of working as an Enterprise IMAP/POP3/SMTP
>> Server?
>
> No. Well… I mean yes… but only for a short period of time. Then
> you’ll have to upgrade. If there are any bugs, you may have to wait
> until the next VERSION of openSUSE (Enterprises frown on things like that).

Network admins, and specially on ‘Enterprise systems’ typically do not wait
for a builder to finally make time to issue an upgrade for a package.
They use “the source” to keep up to date.
A gateway/mail server does not have thousands of packages to keep up to date,
but only a handful of services running. So you set up a minimal CLI-only system,
get the sources for the mail server software (SMTP, IMAP, POP etc) and build
a custom system from the pre-installed basics up (on a separate development
system first of course).

But it depends on the definition of “Enterprise”. For a system that’s supposed
to support tens- or hundreds of thousands clients, one server isn’t enough
for all the mail spooling, logging and authentication etc.

#6

LittleRedRooster schrieb:
> Network admins, and specially on ‘Enterprise systems’ typically do not wait
> for a builder to finally make time to issue an upgrade for a package.
> They use “the source” to keep up to date.

I think you are mistaken there. Network admins, and especially on ‘Enterprise
Systems’, don’t have the time to follow source releases for every piece of
software they install, from the kernel upwards, checking for each new
release whether it (a) provides a critical security fix, (b) does not
introduce any serious regressions and (c) is still compatible with all the
other software on the system. They rely on external services for that -
those of an enterprise distribution.

There are exceptions. Some packages may need particularly speedy updates so
I don’t want to wait for distribution updates for these. (Spam and malware
scanner engines are typical examples.) Some might be notoriously slow in
getting updated. (In the past, SquirrelMail has fallen in this category
for me.) Some might add attractive features but the distribution will only
merge bugfixes. (That has happened to me with various packages already.)
But that concerns only a handful of packages. Even the simplest mailserver
I’m managing (just the essentials for SMTP/IMAP/POP/Webmail service, ie.
Sendmail, Cyrus IMAP, SquirrelMail, MIMEDefang, ClamAV, SpamAssassin) has
over 500 packages installed, the vast majority of them rather uninteresting,
but they have to be kept up to date, lest one of them provide the security
loophole for a hacker to take over the machine.

Point in case: not even the biggest version junkie will want to track the
latest source releases of a simple utility like, say, bzip2 - but it was
exactly that package which recently sported a bug that would constitute a
security hole in combination with ClamAV.

Jm2c
Tilman