[plug] LANS and email and stuff

[Christian]

Bret Busby wrote:
> 
> We have now kind of got an IPchains firewall set up as a gateway for our LAN.

Kind of? :-)

> >From what we understand, we need to install fetchmail to download email from the
> Internet, and sendmail to upload email to the Internet, and cucipop to
> distribute email within the LAN, and, possibly, to distribute email that is
> obtained by fetchmail. Is that correct, or does fetchmail distribute email,
> using filters, as it downloads the email?

You don't *absolutely* really need sendmail, depending on what you want
to do.  You can just point your email clients at your ISPs mail server. 
The advantage of running sendmail on your NAT machine is that you can
spool email there from users even if the modem link is not up.  If
you're going to run an MTA then I would recommend Postfix: it's easier
to configure and more secure than sendmail.

> With the cucipop, I was told that it is available for Debian, but the advisor
> was not sure about it running on other distributions.

It is available for Debian, however, I wouldn't be using a POP3 server
if I were you.  If you have one dedicated machine doing NAT for your
network, run an MTA on this and also an IMAP server (bound only to the
internal interface and/or properly filtered).  Since I take it from your
email address you have a static IP, get your ISP to set their MX record
with first preference to the IP of your machine (for whenever it's
online) and the second preference to their mail server.  Then set up
fetchmail to use ETRN to initiate delivery of email stored on your ISPs
server when you come online.  If your ISP is using BSMTP then this will
work even better.  The advantage of this is that you can use IMAP in
your internal network (anyone can go to any machine and all their mail
will be there waiting for them -- if you use Netscape's Roaming Access
feature this becomes even better).

That's the way I would do it anyway... actually, it is the way I do it
at home and it works really well. :-)

> We are running Red Hat 6 on all but my machine, which runs RH 5.2. Thus, the
> server is RH 6.0.
> I typed cucipop in to the URL text box, and was directed to a site at
> ftp://ftp.cuci.nl/pub, which is, unfortunately, in Holland, and so the text at
> ftp://ftp.cuci.nl/pub/cuciocom.txt is in Dutch.
> Can someone advise what we need to do to get cucipop for RH 6.0, get it
> installed, and configure it?

There's probably an RPM on the Red Hat FTP site.  I don't know, I use
Debian: apt-get install cucipop. :-)

> If there is a "HOWTO", a pointer would be appreciated.

There isn't one AFAIK, but there are lots of different HOWTOs that cover
different aspects of what you're trying to do.  Plus there are manual
pages for everything.

Regards,

Christian.