School Project - is this possible?

[sternfan]

Hi all,

I have a school project that I am researching. The idea is to setup a class where they do their work just as if they were at real jobs, and turn in their work via email. Each class has 4-6 students, and at the most there will only be 20 users involved. At any one time there should be less than 10 active users on the system.

- Issue - the email system must be in a "bubble" - they cannot route any emails anywhere else - not to other local email systems and definitely not the internet. In short, every user involved has everything on the zimbra server. Since this is the opposite of every email system I've ever heard of, I have no idea how to set this up.

- With such low requirements, and the fact that this is an experiment and could possibly be canceled, I was thinking of putting zimbra on a current system running VBox. I really don't have the spare hardware, and if it doesn't work - I just delete the virtual system. VBox is running on an Ubuntu server running RAID10. I figure the system will run fine with 2 CPUs assigned and 4gb ram. It is a 64-bit server with virtualization enabled.

Any comments greatly appreciated,
Rob

[raj]

yes you can stop all emails to internet by 2 ways or i should say you should do both.

1) make sure this machine is not connected to internet at all, only is in isolated internal network and/or VLAN if you have all that.
PS: this is impostant in case "some how" if your emails are public address it will not go out for sure

2) Remove DNS in zimbra settings in zimbra admin there is place to Un-CHECK the Resolve DNS stuff and your mailserver will not use DNS and only the hostfile.
PS: You may need to run local BIND DNS for internal lookup it all depends on your configuration

3) You harware config is more than what you need..i am not sure if VBox virtualization will cause you any trouble. In general Zimbra works on VM just fine but i have not seen many people running it on VBox

Raj

[dalmate]

Zimbra can run well on VBox. Now I'm testing it on VBox and seeing that ok.