Hi there, With our school due a broadband upgrade within the next few months, we have decided to begin preparations by trying to sort out our problematic mailserver. We are currently running INet Easymail V5.09 on a WindowsNT4 machine. This machine also doubles as our Network BDC. Because of this it has been placed on our school private IP range (192.168.4.x) - this makes sense I do believe. We have been having trouble getting EasyMail to receive mail through our SuSELinus Firewall box. It has caused us major headaches over the past two months, and we simply cannot get it sorted - even though all the rules (IPTables) are correct. Our service provider has suggested that we move our mail server to a public IP address to it is directly accessible from the outside and thus does not have to go through any firewalls. Thus we decided upon setting up a SendMail box which would contain two network cards - one public and one private (on the 4.x range). Mail would then arrive on the public address, where Sendmail would route it to our IMail server on NT. Does this make sense to you Guru's out there? Is this setup possible? At the moment, I have no idea how to go about this - what I do know is that I need minimum disruption to the network whilst I learn about Sendmail and relaying through. Is it possible to receive mail in Sendmail and relay it to a private IP address (which will me 192.168.4.3)? Should I have two network cards in the Sendmail machine - one public, one private? Any help is gratefully received, Gareth Edmondson ICT Teacher Ysgol Gyfun Gwyr Swansea

In message giles@satproj.org.uk wrote:

On 2 Jul, Gareth Edmondson wrote:

...

Hi there,

With our school due a broadband upgrade within the next few months, we have decided to begin preparations by trying to sort out our problematic mailserver.

We are currently running INet Easymail V5.09 on a WindowsNT4 machine. This machine also doubles as our Network BDC. Because of this it has been placed on our school private IP range (192.168.4.x) - this makes sense I do believe. We have been having trouble getting EasyMail to receive mail through our SuSELinus Firewall box. It has caused us major headaches over the past two months, and we simply cannot get it sorted - even though all the rules (IPTables) are correct.

<snip>

It is possible to receive mail on a server with a private IP but only indirectly. I have one school here receiving mail on NT under RM connect (sorry). All the mail for the school servers is received initially by a mail hub which passes it to a firewall and on to the school mail server via address translation. In the case of the NT box it is initially received by a linux server which passes mail for a subdomain to the NT box. The whole chain is SMTP. For sendmail this is achieved using the mailertable option (stored in /etc/mail/)

We have a server with a private IP which has mail sent to it through our county firewall. We have a public IP address which is used to do NAT AFAIAA. Through this and an arrangement with them we have 2 servers that are accessible through the firewall from outside. We access them via webmail.romsey.hants.sch.uk and www.romsey.hants.sch.uk addresses. This means that staff and pupils can log on to our email server (and I can FTP to alter the web) from home or school and we have an internal email service that still works even if the broadband connection goes down. I am about to trial a service that will allows pupils and staff to get a listing of their NT domain folders fpr upload and download through the server. this is using a Linux server running Navaho. Works very quickly because they have a single binary for it all. Not cheap though. The web server is a Cobalt Qube running the SunOS Sausilto(?) which is stable but cannot cope with too many requests. I'd like to get a SUSE box up and running to replace it as a web server only using MySQL and PHP to handle our online KS3 ICT course, so i could use logging in and record pupils use of the pages. One day eh?.... Off the point but could be of interest ... Actually our County LEA (Hampshire) are scoping a project to produce a complete learning system to try and incorporate everything from SIMS (or similar) integration and online courses, class setting management and learning system management. They have someone looking into lots of the standards to help with this including AFAICR XML, SOAP, eGIF (??) etc.. I remember it was said that a browser interface was going to be definite, which makes me think they are after using open standards. Can't remember the guys name but I think he was the author of PenDown? for the RISC OS platform. I think their intention is to put together a specification andthen put it out to tender. It may involve working with other authorities and could well lead to something quite big? The reason I mention this is because there was discussion here of a possible open system to challenge SIMS and there may be some people who'd like to keep their eyes open for this. As far as I am aware there is no online material to look at as yet. -- Colin McQueen : Using an Acorn StrongARM Risc PC Web Domain : http://www.mcqueen.uk.net/ BSc Zoology + Oceanography : PGCE : MSc in CBL/T