11.5 Creating Postfix User Accounts and Groups
Postfix requires that some special user accounts
and groups
be created prior to installation.
First create a user account "postfix" with a user
id and group id that are unique (ie not used by any other user
account).
Ideally this should also be an account that no-one can log into. The
account
does not need an executable login shell or a home directory that
exists.
Entries can be added using the /usr/sbin/adduser and /usr/sbin/addgroup
command
line tools.
Typical /etc/password
and /etc/group file entries look like
this.
/etc/passwd:
postfix:*:6789:6789:/no/where:/no/shell
/etc/group:
postfix:*:6789:
Next, create a group called "postdrop" with a
group id that is not used by any other user account. Not even by the
postfix
user account. A typical /etc/group entry looks like:
postdrop:*:9876:
11.6 Installing Postfix
It is recommended that you download the latest
version of
Postfix and install it on your system. Most Linux distributions include
Postfix
but this is sometimes not imstalled by defaults and may well not be the
latest
release.
The very latest Postfix release can be downloaded
from:
https://www.postfix.org/download.html
Once download unpack the archive
and build it using the
“make” command:
make
After the build is complete the
package must be installed.
Installation must be performed as super user and can be achieved using
make as
follows:
make
install
The installation process will ask a number of
questions.
Most of these questions have default responses and in all cases it
should be
safe to accept the default:
install_root: /
tempdir: [/mydir/postfix-2.2.5] (usually directory where you
installed the sources)
config_directory: /etc/postfix
daemon_directory: /usr/libexec/postfix
command_directory: /usr/sbin
queue_directory: /var/spool/postfix
sendmail_path: /usr/sbin/sendmail
newaliases_path: /usr/bin/newaliases
mailq_path: /usr/bin/mailq
mail_owner: postfix
setgid_group: postdrop
html_directory: no
manpage_directory: /usr/local/man
readme_directory: no
Having answered the questions make will install
Postfix on
your system and you are ready to configure it.
