SPF record
An SPF record is simply a TXT type dns record which is used to store information about what IPs are allowed to send email for a specific domain. A receiving mailserver can do a lookup on this TXT record get get this data, and use the information to decide if an IP sending email from a specific domain really is allowed to be sending email for that domain.
There are a few options you can use with SPF records to govern the severity of encforcement on these rules.
Details on these rules can be found here: http://www.openspf.org/SPF_Record_Syntax
Setup your SPF record to use the -all option insetad of the ?all option so that email can *only* be sent from your server. This means that you *must* get all of your clients to send their smtp through your server, or they will be tagged as spam for spoofing. If they’re blocked on port 25 to your server, tell them to send on port 587 to your server (same thing, just not block by the ISP) value of -all, you can either change your DNS zone manually from:
Directadmin-> Admin Level -> DNS Administration -> domain.com or User Level -> DNS Management
change:
“v=spf1 a mx ip4:4.2.2.2 ?all”
to be
“v=spf1 a mx ip4:4.2.2.2 -all”
of course, where 4.2.2.2 should be replaced by your server IP.
Restart named after making the changes. Allow at least 4 hours for the new records to propogate.
Installing Horde in Direct Admin
You can use the following steps to install Horde in a Direct Admin server.
1. First check whether IMAP module is enabled in PHP, if not recompile PHP with IMAP support.
$ vi /usr/local/directadmin/custombuild/configure/ap2/configure.php5
Add the following entries.
–with-imap=/usr/local –with-imap-ssl
$ /usr/local/directadmin/custombuild/build php n
If you are doing the installation in a VPS, sometimes you might get the following error:
configure: error: utf8_mime2text() has new signature, but U8T_CANONICAL is missing. This should not happen. Check config.log for additional information.
To fix this error install the libc-client-devel package
$ yum -y install libc-client-devel.i386 rpm
Now download the horde install script for DirectAdmin and install it.
$ wget http://www.fusion-ict.nl/da_plugin/horde_install.tar.gz
$ tar -zxvf horde_install.tar.gz
$ sh horde_install/horde_install.sh
This will install Horde in the server. Now you can access the Horde webmail using the URL http://domain.com/horde
If you get the following error when accessing Horde through browser,
A fatal error has occured DB Error: connection failed PASSWORD:
then do the following:
$ mysql
mysql > grant all privileges on da_horde.* to da_horde@localhost identified by “PASSWORD”;
mysql > flush privileges;
mysql >\q
3. If you would like to access the Horde using the URL http://webmail.domain.com/ do the following :
First add an A record for webmail.domain.com. Then add the following VirtualHost entry in the /etc/httpd/conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf file and restart httpd service.
$ vi /etc/httpd/conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
<VirtualHost IP1:80 \
IP2:80>
ServerName webmail
ServerAlias webmail.*
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/horde
$ service httpd restart
To Convert from vm-pop3d to Dovecot on Directadmin
To convert to dovecot from wu-imap or vm-pop3d, you can follow the steps given below
The “wu-imap” and “vm-pop3d” are in “mbox” format. The “Dovecot” is using the “Maildir” format.
cd /usr/local/directadmin/customapache
./build update
./build update_dovecot
./build dovecot
./build todovecot
Make sure that you do not stop the “todovecot” command as it can break the whole email system. It can take a long time to convert everything but do not stop it half way through.
Also, make sure that everything is working fine after the conversion.
You can clean the old “mbox” files by typing:
echo “action=delete&value=mbox” >> /usr/local/directadmin/data/task.queue
How to upgrade apache in a directadmin server
For upgrading apache from 1.3.39 to Apache 2.0.63, just login to the server and run following commands/scripts.
#cd /usr/local/directadmin/customapache
#./build update
#./build clean
#./build update_data_ap2
#./build convert
#./build apache_2
#./build php_ap2 n
#./build mod_frontpage_ap2
#./build mod_perl_ap2
DirectAdmin log files, where to look for more infornation and error logs:
/var/log/directadmin/error.log
/var/log/directadmin/errortaskq.log
/var/log/directadmin/system.log
/var/log/directadmin/security.log
