Virtual Mail Hosting in Panther, Tiger Coming

[ylon]

I was about ready to purchase an Xserve to replace a FreeBSD machine, however I became rather concerned with the current state of virtual mail support in Panther vs. what is coming in Tiger. I see that a very robust solution will be offered in Tiger (Thanks MacTroll for pointing this out previously) which appears that it will make Web Hosting a tremendously easier task, however I need to switch to a new server rather quickly and the need has presented itself to go ahead and get a new server rather than staying with this old machine.

My current situation is that I have about 10 domains that I currently host with around 30 e-mail addresses to manage. That is not a whole lot, but will be growing rather quickly within the next 6 months.

Currently I have multiple users with some of the same usernames at different domains, such as [email protected] and [email protected]. This is handled essentially automatically for us at the moment through virtualmin and webmin with FreeBSD by creating users like: jane_doe-somewhere and jane_doe-anotherplace. I am not sure how manageable virtual mail is at the moment in Panther PLUS how well the migration will go when upgrading to Tiger.

I think that if I can figure out a way to do the virtual mail hosting alright along with the virtual domain hosting in apache that using Panther for the moment would be the way to go and then upgrading to Tiger around summer once the first patch (such as 10.4.1 or .2 are released) so as to lend more stability, bugfixes, etc. rather than just jumping on the Tiger train right at release.

Please advise as to how I should work with this situation, assuming that I go ahead and buy and Xserve with Panther right away, and keep the system in a “vanilla” enough state so that an upgrade to Tiger will be flawless in terms of converting users over with the virtual mail functionality. I would very much appreciate any and all input/help!

By the way, I have seen http://maxo.captainnet.net/installs/ per previous discussion with MacTroll and have even chatted with the author about it, but I don’t feel that an easy/clean migration to Tiger’s way, once released, without _much_ work with conversion.

[mdmangus]

We are purchasing an XServe today with about a 3 week time lapse before we receive it.

I am in the same situation with you on needing Virtual hosting capability and we were thinking about implementing:

[quote]
By the way, I have seen http://maxo.captainnet.net/installs/ per previous discussion with MacTroll and have even chatted with the author about it, but I don’t feel that an easy/clean migration to Tiger’s way, once released, without _much_ work with conversion.
[/quote]

What did you decide to do, because this is our same goal:

[QUOTE]
I think that if I can figure out a way to do the virtual mail hosting alright along with the virtual domain hosting in apache that using Panther for the moment would be the way to go and then upgrading to Tiger around summer once the first patch (such as 10.4.1 or .2 are released) so as to lend more stability, bugfixes, etc. rather than just jumping on the Tiger train right at release.
[/QUOTE]

[jgutierrez]

Did you find a solution because I am too in the same situation. Could this can be done with a unique ip address? Any help is very welcome.

[mdmangus]

[QUOTE] – jgutierrez
Did you find a solution because I am too in the same situation. [/QUOTE]

We did purchase an xServe because of GUI enhancements will get better with Tiger and future releases. We are not a hosting provider, so the follwoing article on using Postfix’s Virtual domains helped our situation:

https://www.afp548.com/Articles/Panther/postfixvirtual.html

This requires you to add users to the Workgroup Manager and enable their mail accounts. The above article walks you through on “Supporting multiple domains with Postfix”. Our situation also required us to forward an user’s email to other destinations, so I made use of Postfix’s aliases hash table so that I would not have to create a user’s home direcotry with an hidden .forward file.

I did not do a trial installation for the following alternative. Click to see the demo:
http://maxo.captainnet.net/mailAdmin/index.php

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