Simple personal mail and (maybe) web server

[hezekiah]

I signed up for The 32 today, and I'm looking forward to toying with this account. unixshell# seems to be providing exactly the service I'm looking for.

I'm looking for opinions on the best server software to run for a small site. My only intent with this account is to host personal email for perhaps 1 to 3 people and some basic web hosting for personal and family things so my requirements are fairly minimal. I have a shared hosting account with another provider, and while it serves my purposes reasonably well, I want both the learning experience and the extra control a VPS provides.

In my research, it looks like Debian Sarge or CentOS 4 for the OS, Exim or Qmail + Binc IMAP for mail, Boa or thttpd for serving webpages, and webmin for some gui admin asistance. Any thoughts on these choices? From my research, these seem to be the best options for a single/few user system with limited resources. Once I have everything up and running in a manner I'm happy with, I'll probably upgrade to The 64 plan to add some breathing room.

Thanks for any thoughts/help you can provide. Once I get something up and running, I'd be happy to post a howto if others are interested in doing something similar.

[wjcarpenter]

[QUOTE=hezekiah]In my research, it looks like Debian Sarge or CentOS 4 for the OS, Exim or Qmail + Binc IMAP for mail, Boa or thttpd for serving webpages, and webmin for some gui admin asistance. [/QUOTE]

I have experience with Exim, and I think it is quite easy on the resources as long as you're not getting tons of mail (comparatively, I don't know how it reacts when you tons of mail since I turn back about 90% as junk at the front door :-). It's also quite easy to configure for quite a variety of personal preferences about how email out to be run.

Webmin is pretty nice for saving you rummaging around in config files that you don't otherwise touch much. There are various things that it can't cope with, but for everyday stuff, it's pretty helpful. (I recommend running it over SSL since it used http basic authentication.)

[msh]

I got a 64' where I run a few mail accounts with postfix with SMTP and dovecot as imap and pop3 server, anti spam is provided by SPAMassasin. My webserver runs apache serving static pages.

I use webmin as CP (and BTW webmin only allows SSL logins as default).

The VPS preforms aint breaking a sweat on this configuration.

[wjcarpenter]

[QUOTE=msh]I got a 64' where ..., anti spam is provided by SPAMassasin.[/QUOTE]

For SA, do you run spamd? In a VPS I run hosted elsewhere, I find that the 3.0.2 version of spamd occasionally goes nuts and gets up to about 200 MB process size. That gets me into swapping madness and kills my server performance until I do something about it. I don't actually know what causes it, but it's painful. I've casually looked for patterns that might set it off, but so far no joy.

Have you seen anything like that?

(What I do about it is configure spamd to only handle a few requests per child before it respawns itself. The problem still happens, but at least it corrects itself within a reasonable time.)

[msh]

[QUOTE=wjcarpenter]For SA, do you run spamd? In a VPS I run hosted elsewhere, I find that the 3.0.2 version of spamd occasionally goes nuts and gets up to about 200 MB process size. That gets me into swapping madness and kills my server performance until I do something about it. I don't actually know what causes it, but it's painful. I've casually looked for patterns that might set it off, but so far no joy.
Have you seen anything like that?
[/QUOTE]

YEs, I use spamd. I think I have seen it once or twice, nothing that have caused any real problems.

[cmtech]

You could set a limit on the process memory size using PAM or ulimit.

A quick google and this page looks like it tells you how:

http://lists.virus.org/bugtraq-0207/msg00079.html