I believe linuxczar.net will be soon on the move.  I’ve gotten fantastic service from RimuHosting over the years but the grass looks a little greener at Linode.com.  So I’m working to expand my own personal set of servers and infrastructure and will soon move my web presence to Linode.

I’ve taken the time this weekend to setup a new server to handle my email and IRC needs.  As I begin to fear the safety of my mail at work coupled with wanting my IRC and email on a server in the proper environment I decided it was time to set this up.  I wanted to document, at least for me, pointers to all the notes I used to make it go on a CentOS 5-ish server.

Folks at work pointed me toward SnertSoft and the collection of sendmail milters and such there.  Not what I ended up using, but interesting to poke at anyway.

I discovered a Linux Home Server HOWTO that had a really fantastic section on setting up sendmail, clamav, and spamassassin.  This is most of the information I used having avoided (with good reason) setting up my own mail server in the past.  Very well written.

Technoids.org has a page full of sendmail related information.  What I found most useful here, and used most of the concepts shown, is the article “Help! My Mail Server Is Being DoSsed.”  There is also interesting things like setting up the DNSBLs and whatnot.

I also discovered a great iptables tip to block SSH scans.  The downside is that it will catch normal users if you start up too many SSH connections, but the number of connections is easily configurable.