Topics

16

Installation and Upgrades / how many users can ebox handle?

« on: September 25, 2009, 04:13:10 pm »

I guess it must depend a lot on which parts of ebox are being used?

Well here's my situation.

I've got a lot of people I will have to give basic computing to... about 3000 in fact, but since there will only be 100 (max) workstations available they won't all be online at once!

By "basic computing" what I'm talking about is just web browsing and word processing. The server will have to do gateway/proxy/dhcp and possibly file server tasks too, though I might just make them save everything to thumb drives and their quotas would be VERY small if I did.

There will NOT be any mail, webserver, groupware, jabber, VPNs etc.

I'm salivating at the idea of using ebox-desktop for all the workstations, but I guess it's a little to early for that yet so I'll probably start out with standalone workstations running guest accounts.

The eventual plan eventual plan is for each user to be able to login to any of the workstations and get on a the net through an authenticated proxy. There are some ridiculous "anti-terror" laws planned that could force the logging of all websites visited by our users. Right or wrong I need to be in a position to put something like this in place in the future. 

Presumably with the cheap and powerful hardware available these days this should be possible from this point of view, but what about the management side? I was thinking of maybe some greasemonky scripts to automate user management.

Any comments on this? I might even consider buying support (though I've no idea on cost and this decision is driven almost entirely by price I'm afraid)

BTW in case you're wondering it's for a medical training college to provide library computers to it's UK students... the current requirement is for nowhere near 3000 users but that's the figure it's expected to reach in a year or so.

17

Spanish / Spanish broadband setup?

« on: August 29, 2009, 12:11:24 pm »

Sorry for posting in English in the Spanish board... and for not asking an ebox question, but I've got a problem with a Spanish broadband connection so it seemed the obvious place...

I've got a friend living in Majorca with a Telephonica ADSL conection and a suspect router that I want to replace... I live in the UK and have no idea what type of ADSL setup is used in Spain... pppoa/pppoe what the vpi/vci are, whether I'll have to clone the mac address etc.

Any help/advice/suggestions would be appreciated!

(obviously learning the language of the country your living in is a good suggestion, and one I wish this guy would follow! I think he knows enough to get by day to day but not enough to speak to a technical help line)

Thanks

18

Installation and Upgrades / anti-spam tweaks

« on: June 03, 2009, 05:32:25 pm »

I've been finding that an awful lot of spam has been getting through the ebox mailfilter. I think it's setup right as it does block quite a lot of rubbish, it's just that some of my users insist on posting their email addresses all over various websites so they get a vast number of spams a day.

Anyway I've found that enabling an RBL and adding the reject_unknown_client_hostname check to postfix have helped hugely! Just wondering what other people thought about those options?

Seems to me that a couple of tick boxes on the mailfilter setup page for these two options would be a real help to a lot of people.

Obviously both of these options can block genuine email!!! However I'd guess that around 90+% of spam is stopped like this before it even gets to spamassassin.

Also, checks like these seem to be a standard part of the big providers (gmail/hotmail/yahoo/AOL etc) anti-spam arsenal so if someone can't send to your server because of these settings then chances are they won't be able to any of those providers either which means they really need to fix their own server!



For complete noobs who want to try this out...

Open the /usr/share/ebox/stubs/mail/main.cf.mas file and find the line that looks like this:
$smtpRecipientRestrictions .=  'permit_mynetworks, reject_unauth_destination...

and add
,reject_unknow_client_hostname
before the '; at the end of the line. This makes the server refuse to even talk to computers that don't have properly setup DNS (ie most servers connected via DSL connections... ie PCs with spam sending viruses)

and/or add
,reject_rbl_client bl.spamcop.net
before the '; (RBLs are lists of IP addresses "known" to send spam. There are lots of these lists, I've used bl.spamcop.net because it's FREE!)

restart ebox and tail the mail log. There's something very satisfying about "554 5.7.1 Service unavailable" and "450 4.7.1 Client host rejected" error messages going out to spammers.

19

Installation and Upgrades / eGroupware calendar bug

« on: May 12, 2009, 02:21:34 pm »

If I'm sent a calendar invite in egroupware the URL is wrong...

Code: [Select]

http://localhost/egroupware/index.php?menuaction=calendar.uiforms.edit&cal_id=414&date=20090512&no_popup=1
Looks like it should be a minor fix... localhost needs to be replaced with the correct FQDN, I've no idea where this is set though!

20

Installation and Upgrades / eGroupware sync

« on: April 01, 2009, 05:32:01 pm »

Want to sync your mobile phone, Thunderbird or even (shudder) Outlook with egroupware?

Well it's actually dead easy! eGroupware supports syncML out the box there is just one small change you have to make on the ebox version to get it to work.

By default egroup is setup to use the db for session control you just have to switch this to PHP and you're good to go. I assume the default is to use the database because session control only appeared with PHP4 so this allows egroup to run on php3 systems. Since ebox uses PHP5 maybe it would be worth changing this setting in the setting in the standard install...

Anyhow here's the dummies guide, just run:

Code: [Select]

sudo nano -w /usr/share/egroupware/header.inc.phpsearch for session_type (by pressing ctrl+w and typing in "session_type") which should get you to a line that looks like this:

Code: [Select]

        $GLOBALS['egw_info']['server']['sessions_type'] = 'db';which you need to change to:

Code: [Select]

        $GLOBALS['egw_info']['server']['sessions_type'] = 'php4';press ctrl+o to save and ctrl+x to exit nano.

Now you just need to setup you client with the following info:
Connection:

• Server version - 1.1
• Host address - http://yourdomain.com/rpc.php
• Port - 80 (unless you've changed it for some reason)
• Username/Password - your egroupware login details

Applications:

• calendar - ./calendar
• contacts - ./contacts
• nots - ./notes (these are info log entries)

That works fine on my nokia e51.

To sync Thunderbird/Outlook/blackberries/windowsmobile etc you have to install some syncML software, I've always used funambol but there are probably alternatives.

Here are some links:
http://www.egroupware.org/sync
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/8616
https://www.forge.funambol.org/download/

Enjoy syncing without docking! 

21

Installation and Upgrades / Firewall problem

« on: January 29, 2009, 01:48:09 pm »

Hi,

I'm setting up an ebox with 2 nics to act as a gateway/mail/web/vpn server.

The external nic is on a /29 subnet with a public IP address.

When I try to create a "Packet Filter" rule "from external to ebox" for any service then I can access it from other machines on the /29 subnet but not from other machines over the Internet.

Any suggestions 

I'm guessing my problems come from having my own subnet, but what's the best way to work round this?

Here's what the network looks like:

internet<===>router X.85.230.185 <===>Firewall 1 X.85.230.186<===> internal network 1
                                                      <===>ebox         X.85.230.188<===> internal network 2

So machines on "internal network 1" can telnet to the smtp server but machines on the internet can't