Scalix and ASSP?

[humpty]

I am trying to migrate from ASSP+postfix+cyrus-imap to Scalix to get shared addressbook and calendar support.

I've got Scalix working fine almost straight out of the box. The problem starts when I try to add ASSP back in. I'd really like to keep it as it is very simple to maintain and filters far more spam than SpamAssassin (which I haven't the time to maintain).

I moved omsmtpd from port 25 to port 225 by editing smtpd.cfg and I could telnet to port 225 and send mail just fine. All well so far.

Now I loaded ASSP on port 25 and told it that the destination smtp server was on 225. ASSP acts as a filter proxy for the real server so relays every exchange back to the end user. I can telnet to port 25 and can send messages fine, with all the responses looking like I'm talking directly to the Scalix relay. The only problem is that there is a 70s delay on every exchange so sending mail takes forever. I suspect a flow control problem between ASSP and Scalix.

I can get it to work just fine by running ASSP on a different server, all the delays are gone.

Would someone be kind enough to suggest anything I can try to get this working as I want? I know this is an unsupported configuration but the ease of use of ASSP makes it an obvious partner to Scalix.

thanks
Kevin Thorpe

[ScalixSupport]

Can you tell ASSP not to bind to port 25 on localhost?

Thanks,
Don

[humpty]

Ah, I understand somewhat better now. I didn't realise that Scalix and sendmail both bind to port 25, albeit on different IP addresses. I wasn't even aware that such a thing was a reasonable configuration. Makes sense now I think about it though. I also didn't realise properly that Scalix hands off to sendmail for non-local recipients (should have done really but I don't know sendmail either).

I think you've hit the nail on the head that the problem is that ASSP is transparently proxying Scalix smtpd which is trying to hand off to localhost:25 and getting ASSP not sendmail (nasty loop that!).

I'll have another fiddle and see if I can get ASSP to only bind to the actual IP of the server, not localhost. If not I'll stick with a separate filtering server then Scalix runs almost straight out of the box. Far simpler to document for maintenance that way.

Scalix looks good though. Thanks

[humpty]

Scalix and ASSP - SOLVED

Thanks for your support. I've got this working properly now. As I said in my previous post it was not understanding the interaction between Sclix and sendmail.

The way to get this to work is to have the components bind to the follwing addresses:
Scalix - host.domain.com:225
sendmail - localhost:25
ASSP - host.domain.com:25 - relaying to Scalix on host.domain.com:225

All then works just fine.

[abostick]

humpty,

Do you also have a smarthost config for sendmail for outbound mail from scalix so that ASSP's auto whitelisting just works?

I saw another post on here about the smarthost needing a different domain name otherwise sendmail thinks it is a mail loop? What does your sendmail.cf look like for this?

Thanks,
Aaron

[BaldBoy]

Hi abostick, to achieve auto-whitelisting feature as provided by ASSP you have to:
- choose a different port ASSP will listen on for outgoing mail (different from the one used for inbound mails): let's say it's 25000
- configure ASSP to establish a second listen point on that port. You can find the "Another Listen Port" in Network Setup panel of the web ui or look for the listenPort2 in cfg file. Parameter has to be written in the form <what.ever.ip.is>:25000
- configure ASSP to route incoming connections on this secondary port to the outbound relay server: another MTA on your network allowed to relay or your ISP's relay server. Do not reroute to scalix itself ! Parameter in ASSP is SMTP Auth Destination (in web ui) or smtpAuthServer in cfg file. Same syntax as per the previous parameter.
- now you have to modify sendmail.cf from /etc folder (make a backup copy first)

Go and edit the file linux.mc from /etc/mail folder and add these two lines:

Code: Select all

define(`SMART_HOST', `<ip.of.assp.2ndlisten>') dnl
define(`RELAY_MAILER_ARGS', `IPC $h 25000') dnl


Recreate sendmail.cf by

Code: Select all

sudo sh -c "m4 /etc/mail/linux.mc > /etc/sendmail.cf"


Restart Scalix and sendmail.

You're done.