Simple RHEL 5 smtp server with TLS in 30 minutes. Honest.

Posted by nick.stielau on January 13, 2009

After previously bashing my brains against setting up an external SMTP server, I did my best to shirk the work on somebody else. That of course, is not one of my strong points, so it landed squarely back in my lap. I am wary of any tool whose configuration requires other tools, as sendmail certainly does. I also love a quote I ran across on some mail list: "Nicht ein Kernal Panik? Nicht ein Core dump? Est sendmail". Now I don't speak German, so forgive my paraphrasing, but you get the point.

Anyway, hats off to Joey, with his simple instructions about a RHEL 5 SMTP server in Linux Gazette.

Here are a few things that might help. Before you get started with Joey's instructions, run

CODE:
  1. sudo yum install sendmail-cf
  2. export PATH="$PATH:/sbin:/usr/sbin"

Additionally, the auth system goes off your linux users, so just add a user and give it a password if you want to authenticate.