Install iRedMail on OpenBSD

System Requirements

WARNING: iRedMail is designed to be deployed on a FRESH server system, which means your server does NOT have mail related components installed, e.g. MySQL, OpenLDAP, Postfix, Dovecot, Amavisd, etc. iRedMail will install and configure them for you automatically. Otherwise it may override your existing files/configurations althought it will backup files before modifing, and it may be not working as expected.

To install iRedMail on OpenBSD, you need:

Notes:

Preparations

Set a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) hostname on your server

No matter your server is a testing machine or production server, it's strongly recommended to set a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) hostname.

Enter command hostname -f to view the current hostname:

$ hostname -f
mx.example.com

On OpenBSD, hostname is set in two files: /etc/myname and /etc/hosts.

mx.example.com
# Part of file: /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1   mx.example.com mx localhost localhost.localdomain

Verify the FQDN hostname. If it wasn't changed after updating above two files, please reboot server to make it work.

$ hostname -f
mx.example.com

Choose a nearest mirror site for installing binary packages

iRedMail will install all required binary packages with command pkg_add -i, it will check whether you have mirror site defined in PKG_PATH environment variable, if defined, pkg_add will install packages from defined mirror site.

It's recommended to install packages from a mirror site, to reduce server load on OpenBSD primary servers. Also, installing package from a nearest mirror site will speed up package installation. You can find mirror list near you on OpenBSD web site: Getting OpenBSD.

Now login to the OpenBSD server as root user, set variable PKG_PATH in file /root/.profile like below (use your nearest mirror site instead):

export PKG_PATH="http://ftp.jaist.ac.jp/pub/OpenBSD/`uname -r`/packages/`machine -a`/"

Install Bash shell, it's required by iRedMail.

# . /root/.profile    # <- This steps is required, used to set PKG_PATH without re-login.
# pkg_add bash

Download the latest release of iRedMail

# cd /root/
# tar xjf iRedMail-x.y.z.tar.bz2

Start iRedMail installer

For Chinese users: Our domain name "iredmail.org" is blocked in China mainland since Jun 04, 2011, please replace all 'iredmail.org' by its IP address "106.187.51.47" (without quotes) in /root/iRedMail-x.y.z/pkgs/get_all.sh BEFORE executing "iRedMail.sh". This is a Linode VPS hosted in Tokyo, Japan.

It's now ready to start iRedMail installer, it will ask you several simple questions, that's all steps to setup a full-featured mail server.

# cd /root/iRedMail-x.y.z/
# bash iRedMail.sh

Screenshots of installation:

IMPORTANT NOTE: There's no big difference between available backends, so it's strongly recommended to choose the one you're familiar with for easier management and maintenance after installation.

LDAP suffix.

Password of LDAP root dn.

NOTE: MySQL is used to store data of other applications (e.g. Roundcube webmail, Cluebringer, Amavisd-new) if you choose OpenLDAP or MySQL as backend.

Note: This account is an admin account and a mail user. That means you can login to webmail and admin panel (iRedAdmin) with this account, login username is full email address.

After answered above questions, iRedMail installer will ask your confirm to start installation. It will install and configure required packages automatically. Type y or Y and press Enter to start.

Configuration completed.

*************************************************************************
**************************** WARNING ***********************************
*************************************************************************
*                                                                       *
* Please do remember to *REMOVE* configuration file after installation  *
* completed successfully.                                               *
*                                                                       *
*   * /root/iRedMail-x.y.z/config
*                                                                       *
*************************************************************************
<<< iRedMail >>> Continue? [Y|n]        # <- Type 'Y' or 'y' here, and press 'Enter' to continue

Important things you MUST know after installation

Access webmail and other web applications

After installation successfully completed, you can access web-based programs if you choose to install them. Replace your_server below by your real server hostname or IP address.

Get technical support

Please post all issues, feedbacks, feature requests, suggestions in our online support forum, it's more responsible than you expected.

Notes about binary packages provided by iRedMail project

Most binary packages in iRedMail yum repository comes from below repositories, packages with -ired flag were packed by iRedMail project.


If you found something wrong in this document, please do contact us to fix it.

This tutorial is published under a CC BY-ND 3.0 license.