Zimbra OpenSource in College campus

[bw_linuxlab]

Dear Zimbra Gurus, we are going to setup a Zimbra OpenSource edition Mail Server on our own premises at a Engineering college.

We will have a dedicated Server,Public IP,registered domain name.

now please guide us to setup this server securely.

The setup will serve the students, faculties & administrative people.

Webmail interface should be accessible from any location,on the desktop we may use outlook express and thunderbird clients.

if any one has a similar setup documentation ready please mail us at linux@brainware-india.com.

once we implement it, we will post our documentation here.

[uxbod]

Welcome to the forums

Firstly read through Community Edition :: Quick Start Guide and then read through it again

With respect to security define your full requirements up front eg. Would you need to open IMAP/S to the outside world ? If not then you would only need to open ports 25 and 443 on your firewall. Yes, no port 80; why you ask ? well you can switch Zimbra to only use HTTPS which is a far better proposal.

[bw_linuxlab]

Thnx for the quick reply, most probably we wont hv to give imap access to outside world. and all administration will be done locally, no remote access to the admin console is required.

we may go for Cyberoam UTM appliance as the security device,is that compatible with Zimbra?

we will need help regarding setting up the BIND dns server, we will contact you guys shortly when we have full requirements at our hand.

thanx again.

[uxbod]

As long as the device allows SMTP and HTTPS traffic then I see no reason why it would not work. Does it also provide anti-spam/anti-virus scanning ? if so and it holds its own quarantine you may need to look how to integrate the authentication with Zimbra so that your users do not require multiple accounts and passwords. If it supports LDAP then that is great

[bw_linuxlab]

Cyberoam - Gateway Security Appliance, SME Security Appliances

please take a look. we are using one Cyberoam CR50ia device, but found that standard mail download(from pop3) is tad slow, due to realtime virus scanning. we can turn that off & use zimbra's inbuilt AV.

As far as the authentication with Cyberoam, it uses a simple client software to authenticate users to its services,we can also bypass it because only the Zimbra Server will be its client.

Cyberoam Device is our choice because it offers WAN load balancing,Intrusion detection & prevention system.

anyway, i will provide you more info on the project as soon as i get them, its nice to meet u.

[bw_linuxlab]

Dear uxbod,

we have the detail requirement for our Zimbra Mail Server (OpenSource Edition).

we will have 2 mail domains - ex. maildomain1.com (with 3 subdomains- a.maildomain1.com , b.maildomain1.com , c.maildomain1.com) & maildomain2.com.

we will only have one physical server for this setup.

these 2 mail domains will have separate public IP. Clients will access webmail & also use MS Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird as desktop clients.We will only give secured pop3 & smtp access.


Will Zimbra OpenSource Edition support this setup?

I will require help in setting up the DNS Server with proper MX records,and multidomain Zimbra Server.

thnks in advanced....

[uxbod]

Yes that will be no problem at all. Why do you wish to use two public IP addresses ? Zimbra will quite happily work on one and serve your needs; unless their is a specific reason you need two.

[bw_linuxlab]

We will register 2 different mail domains and they should point to 2 different public ip,because in a college environment, if we experience spam & the domain registrar blocks one domain , still the other domain will be functional.


now tell me about ideal Server config for this kind of setup - we are talking about 2500-3000 mailboxes initially, server will run 24x7x365 , it should have redundant power supply & we may configure Clustering. Our platform is CentOS Server 5.3 32bit.