Hosting Email seperate from cpanel on web servers????

[sowell]

Is it possible to host email, using cpanel on the web servers, on their own servers? I have heard conflicting things about this and as the date gets closer that we need to implement these machines I need to sort it out once and forall.

Any documentation you could throw at me as well would be GREATLy appreciated.


With the exception ofmail and database what else can cpanel handle being hosted off of its installed service but still access? My worry is ease of administration and load.

Thanks in advance.

[cPanelDavidG]

Is it possible to host email, using cpanel on the web servers, on their own servers? I have heard conflicting things about this and as the date gets closer that we need to implement these machines I need to sort it out once and forall.

Any documentation you could throw at me as well would be GREATLy appreciated.


With the exception ofmail and database what else can cpanel handle being hosted off of its installed service but still access? My worry is ease of administration and load.

Thanks in advance.

This functionality (mail clustering) is not yet natively supported by cPanel/WHM. It doesn't mean it can't be done, it just means you have to be willing to "get your hands dirty" under the hood of your server to get it to work .

You may also want to perform a search for mail clustering as I believe there was recently a thread discussing precisely how to do this in a cPanel/WHM environment.

[sowell]

thanks for the advice, I did search before I posted, obviously just not well enough.

[freedman]

Is it possible to host email, using cpanel on the web servers, on their own servers? I have heard conflicting things about this and as the date gets closer that we need to implement these machines I need to sort it out once and forall.

Any documentation you could throw at me as well would be GREATLy appreciated.


With the exception ofmail and database what else can cpanel handle being hosted off of its installed service but still access? My worry is ease of administration and load.

Thanks in advance.

you have a couple of options here.
if you're not managing the email servers (we have a few clients that use apriver, I've no idea why, or some of those 'buy an exchange server mailbox for a small fortune' services), then it's just a matter of changing the MX record in their dns.

if you're going to be managing their email but on a server for which you desire not to pay the cpanel licensing, then you have other options:
it will depend on whether or not you want to use the cpanel webmail and related options for your users to read their email, or if you're just going to use the mail servers to allow pop/imap/smtp access.

so, the MailServer Only solution:
install exim and courier-imap on the mail server.
rsync the following on a regular basis from your cpanel server to your mail server:
from /etc: valiases vdomainaliases vfilters vmail localdomains userdomains remotedomains secondarymx

you should be able to copy over the exim configs that cpanel builds.
if you're using ssl imap/exim then make an ssl cert and put it in (I think) /usr/share/ssl, it might be in /etc.. can't remember.

now, point your mx records to this new server.
when people add/remove email's forwarders, etc, those files will get synced to the mail server via rsync (figure out how often to do this) and you're pretty much done.
(make sure you have the directory structure for exim to drop the mail in the proper places).

NOW IF you want to allow peopl eto use webmail on the cpanel servers to read mail, then you have to get the mail from the mail server, into their home directories on the cpanel server.

you could rsycn them back, but ideally you'd want to push the messages to the cpanel server, and use the mail server for receiving mail and the cpanel for people getting their messages.

look into a tool called "unison", it will do bi-directional syncing and you wont have to worry about messes to clean up.


note: this is not a complete solution, but it should get you going.

[sowell]

wow, you are awesome, I will look into what you have just posted, unison sounds like an interesting solution. I've tried doing shared hosting with web and mail on the same box and its just a mess. Spam filtering is a large load and id rather not deal with it, which is my main concern. Thank you for the reply.

Sol

[kirkmiesle]

Do you know with the method you described above (rsync the files in /etc..) if auto responders/forwarder configurations will still work via cPanel? Or will that stuff all need manually setup on the mail server..

Kirk

[freedman]

Do you know with the method you described above (rsync the files in /etc..) if auto responders/forwarder configurations will still work via cPanel? Or will that stuff all need manually setup on the mail server..

that's what the /etc/v... folders are for.
they have all the forwarder information.
there may be some syncing issues with very active mailman mailing lists.. it's important that only one machine run the batches to send the daily digests or people might get duplicates.

I havn't anybody with named pipes in their forwarders, but it should work fine as long as the thing named exists on both machines.