So building on the email/imap server success. I’ve finally learned how to host multiple domains on Apache!!! Yes I know I haven’t reinvented the wheel and I’m pretty sure that I would have figured it out had I needed it earlier but still it’s bad ass to be able to do so. That in and of itself is pretty cool but what’s more amazing is the fact that using SSL is now free and accessible to the masses thanks to LetsEncrypt. For those of you who don’t know, just a few years ago having a secure site (i.e. a SSL/TLS certificate to secure traffic to and from your site) meant having to fork over $50 bucks a pop per year for each domain. Hosting sites like GoDaddy have been screwing clients for years with this. Enter LetsEncrypt, a consortium of industry heavy weights now offer free certs, they are only 90 day but thanks to Linux the update process it automated. Life is good!

So everyone knows that Linux is the ultimate toy for computer geeks, it can do anything, do it well and do it free. It was a little over two years ago I broke down and bought a Dell PowerEdge T30. I know, it’s about as entry level as you can get. 8Gb of RAM and 1 TB hard drive but it is sporting a 4x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1225 v5 @ 3.30GHz. I did upgrade the RAM to 16Gb (wow ECC memory is steep). And the coup de grace was finding 3Tb SAS drives on New Egg for $50 apiece. Bought 4 of those bad boys and spent $30 for a h310 card and have a RAID 5 striped 8Tb volume to play with. Only have mounted 1Tb and still have tons of room.

In any case, I’m super excited to have the email piece up and running using postfix and dovecot. Some people say “big deal, it’s email”, to which I just sigh. The fact that email is ubiquitous belies the complexity of actually getting one of these set up and functioning. With that said I’m super excited to say I’ve got it up and running for multiple domains both sending and receiving. OK, it’s still using flat files to map users but I’m working on getting it setup on MySQL so more to come on that end.