Last weekend, I decided to make some major changes to my VPS. It’s really major since I also decided to change my OS. I also moved on to using other services which I think would either be more secure, efficient, or just simply for me to learn new stuffs on Linux. It took me quite some time to build up all the services due to my day job, and right now there are still a couple of personal websites I haven’t restored but hopefully I can have everything up and running by the end of this week.
To summarize the things I’ve done, here are a couple of overviews of the major changes I worked on:
RedHat AS 3 to CentOS 4
I’m not sure if most people would agree on me on this, but since my VPS provider doesn’t have yum or up2date installed with their RedHat AS 3 OS choice, I decided to move to CentOS 4. It’s not that I use yum or up2date most of the time, since I’m more comfortable installing stuffs from their source codes. Let’s just say that I just want to reserve the right to install things automatically during those lazy afternoons, or “let’s just get on with it, quickly” moments. Moreover, I think CentOS forums and support groups are more readily available in the world wide web.
SendMail to QMail-LDAP
Hmmm..this is something I wanted to do in a long time. In my old VPS, I just decided to use Sendmail to have a running mail server quickly. I told myself that once I got the time, I’ll move everything to QMail or QMail-LDAP. Sad to say that “time” I waited for didn’t come. I think Sendmail is ok, especially that it supports most of the mail server addons out there, such as mail virus scanners, vacation scripts, DB backends, etc. But somehow, I still can’t remove from my thoughts the previous security and virus vulnerabilities that Sendmail had shown. I know that some people would comment that Sendmail had changed since then and that it is far more stable and secure right now compared to its previous versions, but I still need some time to move on to that kind of thought and get over with tragic memories of Sendmail. I think Qmail-LDAP had proven itself worthy of my trust for security and stability since I had used it for both personal and production servers. Moreover, Dan Bernstein even offers a reward for someone who could find a security hole on QMail and as far as I know nobody ever got that reward. Also the idea of putting all email accounts on an LDAP backend database and not having to create a system account for each is really something I find very useful and secure for my server. Morover, setting up different email account attributes such as aliases, external delivery programs, quotas, etc. are far more easier to do on Qmail-LDAP than on Sendmail.
PHP4 to PHP5
This is the first time I was able to make PHP5 to work on a Linux server. It’s not that I don’t know how to do it but it’s more of the applications and web services I used before were still not fully compliant with PHP5. But last night, I just decided to give it another shot and I’m happy to say that everything’s A-OK right now on my PHP based applications and web services. I’m still not sure what benefits I would reap from using the latest PHP version, but I heard a lot of good comments about it regarding security and performance. So far, I’ve seen some performance improvements, but I still need some time and more proofs to believe that PHP5 is really better than PHP4.
Dovecot To Courier-IMAP
I have nothing against Dovecot, but since Courier-IMAP is oftentimes the IMAP server of choice for Qmail-LDAP, I decided to just go with the flow and make use of it. Besides, I’ve been working with Courier-IMAP with several production servers in the past, and I had never seen any problems with it.
Procmailrc to Maildrop
When it comes to mail delivery and filtering programs, I was very much comfortable with Procmailrc. But while I was working on my mail server, I decided to find some new things I could use with it and that’s when I stumbled upon Maildrop. It came from the same makers of Courier Mail Applications/Services and so when I tried using Courier-IMAP I came across Maildrop in the web pages of Courier-IMAP. So far, I find Maildrop a cool application to use because of its ease of installation and integration with Qmail-LDAP.
There’s still a lot of things I did with my new VPS, but to post them all here would just make this a very, very, very long post. Let’s just say that here are just the things I consider as “major changes”. 
[tags]CentOS, Redhat, Courier-IMAP, Maildrop, Qmail, LDAP, Qmail-LDAP, Sendmail, Dovecot, PHP, VPS, Operating Systems[/tags]
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