Greetings and salutations,
I hope this thread will be helpful to those who follow in my foot steps.
High-level overview
NethServer is based on CentOS and can server multiple roles but for this purpose, we will only be using it as a mail server. It is generally not a good idea to run multiple services such as login authentication and email since authentication should be on a server only accessible via LAN and a mail server which is accessible via WAN (or by proxy). This process was documented on a virtual machine running on top of a Proxmox server so there will likely be little to no mention of hypervisor-specific steps since Proxmox does not require guest tools to be installed.
Tools utilized in this process
- NethServer 7.8.2003
- Portable PuTTY 0.73
- Proxmox 6.2
The list below are sources of information that was helpful in the creation of this document.
Assumptions
This documentation assumes you already have a domain name setup on a DNS server and you already have port-forwarding rules setup in your hardware router/firewall.
This documentation will need to make use of some very-specific information that will most-likely be different for each person / location. And as such, this information will be noted in this section. They will be highlighted in red throughout the document as a reminder that you should plug-in your own value rather than actually using these "place-holder" values.
Under no circumstance should you use the actual values listed below. They are place-holders for the real thing. This is just a checklist template you need to have answered before you start the install process.
Wherever you see RED in this document, you need to substitute it for you will use in your environment.
- Internet domain: mydomain.com
Host A Record: mail.mydomain.com
Host A Record: smtp.mydomain.com
MX Record: mail.mydomain.com - Server External IP address: 8.9.10.11
- Server Internal IP address: 192.168.107.25
- Server name: srv-mail
- Root Password: myadminpass
Proxmox Virtual Machine Settings
Here are the settings I used. Adjust as needed:
- Name: srv-mail
- ISO Image: nethserver-7.8.2003-x86_64.iso
- Guest OS Type: Linux
- Guest OS Version: 5.x - 2.6 Kernel
- Disk Size: 30 GB
- CPU Socket: 1
- CPU Core: 1
- Memory (MiB): 2048
- Network Bridge: vmbr0, VirtIO Paravirtualized, Firewalled