I am new to linode and would like to set up a simple mail server with spam assassin. I installed fedora core 2 and did a yum install postfix. On reboot only two postfix procs are shown:

postfix 11994 0.0 1.9 5396 1436 ? S 11:24 0:00 pickup -l -t fifo -u
postfix 11995 8.0 1.9 5428 1468 ? S 11:24 0:00 nqmgr -l -n qmgr -t fifo -u

I have a local, physical server that currently runs my mail server - the one I am attempting to migrate to linode! I installed suse linux and postfix no problem from the install dvd. It reports lots of postfix procs:
postfix 4854 0.0 0.1 4288 612 ? S 2005 0:16 qmgr -l -t fifo -u
postfix 27987 0.0 0.2 4680 1404 ? S 08:05 0:00 pickup -l -t fifo -u
postfix 28208 0.0 0.3 5000 1968 ? S 09:20 0:00 smtpd -n smtp -t inet -u -s 2
postfix 28209 0.0 0.2 4668 1392 ? S 09:20 0:00 proxymap -t unix -u
postfix 28210 0.0 0.2 4684 1432 ? S 09:20 0:00 trivial-rewrite -n rewrite -t unix -u
postfix 28211 0.0 0.2 4720 1480 ? S 09:20 0:00 cleanup -z -t unix -u
postfix 28212 0.0 0.3 4792 1688 ? S 09:20 0:00 local -t unix

I would think that almost everyone running a linode would have some mail facilities installed. Would someone have a pointer to get me going? Maybe another distro would be easier? And any opinions about dovecot, qpopper etc?

thanks,

jimbo

Startup of postfix daemons is controlled by the 'master.cf' config file; perhaps fedora is disabling most of them by default? If that's okay, then check the logs for why those daemons are failing. One strong possibility is that you're trying to run them in a chroot (good!), but haven't set up the chroot properly (bad). Have you run "postfix check"? It will identify many of these kinds of issues. The postfix website (www.postfix.org) has lots of good docs on troubleshooting postfix installations.

No need to reboot: "postfix stop" and "postfix start" should be sufficient.

If you don't care which distro you run, I'd pick Debian over Fedora. Postfix runs out-of-box there.

Edited to add: FWIW, unless you have something larger than a linode 80, or have relatively small e-mail volumes, you'll probably find SpamAssassin to be to big to run on a linode. Maybe if that's *all* you do with it.

_________________
The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the world.
-- seen on the net

I installed Qmail + ClamAV + SpamAssassin on Fedora 2 using this step-by-step guide. The guide is great and will walk you through doing this on several distributions.

However, as was mentioned, it's true that if you're on a Linode 80 (which I am), running all of these services seems to really slow things down -- a lot. As email is the primary utility for the Linode I'm running, it doesn't really matter to me.

But, if you wanted to just use the guide to get Qmail set up with some nice administrative (web-based) interfaces and leave ClamAV and SpamAssassin off, the guide is structured to let you do that.

What host are you on?

I am on host15.

I'm certainly not complaining -- I wouldn't expect this setup to perform well while running all of that stuff. I'm running Apache2, MySQL 5, PHP 5, Qmail (SMTP/POP/IMAP/IMAPS), ClamAV, SpamAssassin, iptables all on a Linode 80.

Actually, I should say that I previously had this setup with CentOS and it seemed really sluggish, at least when loading a Drupal-based blog. I don't know if it's just my perception now, but it feels more responsive now having switched to Fedora Core 2.

Aside from trying to keep everything up-to-date, with this Linode I'm not concerned about performance. I'm quite impressed that I can keep this stuff running with the level of stability it has with so little resources.