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djangofan
Asked: 2011-11-29 17:00:11 +0800 CST

Creating a mail server on Amazon EC2?

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Does anyone know the latest AMI that has the preconfigured Postfix mail server on it, for use with a "micro" instance of Amazon EC2? I'm having trouble searching for a AMI instance using ElasticFox . I can't find anything newer than like 2009...

postfix

1 Answers

  1. Never look for AMIs using ElasticFox or using the community tab in Amazon's EC2 console or using the ec2-describe-images -a command. These tools make it difficult to know who publishes the AMIs which is critical in determining what AMIs you can trust.

    Always look for an AMI id in a list that is published by a source that you trust. For an Ubuntu AMI, that would be a place like:

    http://cloud.ubuntu.com/ami/

    If you trust me, you can also look in the table I publish at the top of:

    http://Alestic.com

    This table is updated automatically from the list of AMIs published by Canonical.

    Scott Moser has written a longer article that talks about the challenge of finding the right Ubuntu AMI:

    http://ubuntu-smoser.blogspot.com/2011/07/how-to-find-right-ubuntu-ami-on-ec2.html

    There's no need to look for an AMI with Postfix pre-installed or pre-configured. Not only are these unlikely to come from trusted sources, but they are also unlikely to be configured in exactly the way that you need them to be.

    Postfix can be used for many different purposes and you need to make sure yours is configured with the correct values for your installation (outbound, inbound, domain names, relays, certificates, etc.).

    You can start with a standard Ubuntu server AMI and install Postfix yourself using apt-get or aptitude. Here's the section for Postfix in the Server Guide for Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric:

    https://help.ubuntu.com/11.10/serverguide/C/postfix.html

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