Put A New Face On Your Mail Server

Hello again,

I personally have run my own mail servers for many years. There are lots of good reasons for that choice. The two most compelling reasons for me have been: unlimited encrypted storage and encrypted IMAP and SMTP via SSL. In my experience, the weakest area of open source mail services has been the lack of a good opensource webmail interface that supports IMAPS and SMPTS. Back in 2005, the RoundCube WebMail project came on the scene. Other webmail projects have been around but in my opinion RoundCube is still the best opensource option.

So what does this have to do with The Zone Manager? I'm glad you asked! How would you like to be able to set up your own RoundCube WebMail service IN ONE STEP? Impossible you say!!! Well delight in the following example of the power of Solaris Zones coupled with The Zone Manager.

# zonemgr -a add -n rcmail -z /zones -P pw -s lock \
-I "192.168.1.12|bfe0|24|rcmail" -C /rcmail.sh \
-G apache2 -G mysql5 -G ap2_modphp5 -G php5_mysql \
-G pcre -G php5_imap -C /etc/resolv.conf \
-C "/etc/nsswitch.dns|/etc/nsswitch.conf" \
-X "/rcmail.sh -m pw -r pw -R webmail.example.com \
-h imap.example.com -H smtp.example.com"

Note that I replaced my actual serer names and the TCP/IP address with generic ones. The above invocation of The Zone Manager results in the following actions:

• Adds a sparse non-global zone named rcmail,
  
• Places the zone in /zones/rcmail,
  
• Sets the root user's password,
  
• Adds a network interface,
  
• Sets up name resolution,
  
• Remotely installs apache, mysql5, mod_php5, php5_mysql, pcre, and php5_imap from the Blastwave,
  
• Copies and runs my simple /rcmail.sh script in the non-global zone.

Upon completion, I can access the webmail with https://webmail.example.com. Here is a snapshot of the login page.



And here is a snapshot of the main page after successfully logging in.



You can easily write your own simple installer script like my /rcmail.sh script to automate the installation of just about any opensource kit.

To learn more about and see more screen shots of RoundCube WebMail, visit their web site.

Enjoy!

Brad