Re: dynamic IP's, IP masq and mail, can it be done?
Ethan Benson wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I have a small network connected to the internet via a IP masq
> gateway, and would like to get mail working, but the above setup is a
> nightmare for mail it would seem.
>
> is it even possible for mail to work in such a setup or am i wasting
> my time? I got the gateway machine to send mail, but my fake domain
> still shows up in various places, such as the message ID and a second
> From line. and in order to do that i had to setup a virtual table
> for all the local user accounts, otherwise when cron or something
> send mail to root it would go to root@alaska.net ...
>
> I am using Postfix and have gone through pretty much all of the
> documentation on the web site and still don't have this all working
> very well, and it seems to be a very very messy setup.
I'm using postfix on slink to do this now. It's been a while since I
set it up so I may be a little vague about some of the details, my
notebook with my debian notes has gone missing.
Do you have a domain already? If you do, see if your isp will do uucp
delivery for you. My home lan gets its mail via uucp from my desktop
machine at work. If you don't have a domain and are unwilling to pay
for a top level domain, talk to the folks at dyndns.org about getting a
subdomain from them.
To do this (from vague memory, there may be a little more to it than
this)
1) set up a uucp link between your home gateway machine and your isp.
There is a howto on this, so I won't go into detail.
2) set up your domain's dns so that your isp is the mx for your domain.
3) have your isp configure their end so that all mail for your domain is
transferred via uucp to your machine.
4) Set up your home machine to send all mail outside your domain to your
isp (check out the postfix faq for details) via uucp. This isn't
totally necessary if you have a fast link - I have a cablemodem and do
all my outgoing delivery myself.
5) Set up your ip-up script to add a call of 'uucico -S ispuucpname' to
force a connection to pick up your pending mail & send out your outgoing
queue.
6) add a cron job to do 'uucico -S ispuucpname' every hour or so to pick
up your mail
If you want to have incoming uucp over tcp and use a seperate password
file for uucp (recommended), put the password entries into
/etc/uucp/passwd and add
uucp stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/tcpd
/usr/sbin/uucico -l
to your inetd.conf and then kill -HUP inetd
When I was using diald and ppp for a dialup connection, I had my ip-up
script touch /var/run/linkup and then had ip-down remove it. Then I
could have cron jobs check to see if the link was already up before
doing anything.
The big advantage of having your mail come in over uucp is that it will
resume interrupted transfers where they left off, rather than making you
retransmit the whole message. Very nice if you have timed local phone
service.
If your own isp won't do this, there are companies out there who will,
including the consulting firm I work with (http://www.communiweb.net).
jpb
--
Joe Block <jpb@creol.ucf.edu>
CREOL System Administrator
Social graces are the packet headers of everyday life.
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