I can sympathise as I looked into doing this first with sendmail and more recently with postfix. Unfortunately after spending lots of time reading, I could not put the pieces together the right way to run a home server. My circumstances were similar to yours - multiple machines on a 198.162.x.x network, trying DynDns, etc. Some things I did along the way that helped: Installed DD-wrt on my wireless router that gave me better control over network operation, such as assigning static addresses to all my machines, allowed automatic updates of my DynDns IP address, etc.
My most pressing need was to have outbound service, the capability to send updates from some of my servers to my gmail and work accounts, as well as send received faxes from my fax server. I found a nice program called Simple SMTP (ssmtp) that did exactly what I wanted and took all of 10 min to install, configure, and test. It may be of some value to you. While I would dearly love the inbound mail service capability (very helpful for me to use my email to fax gateway), the outbound only service suffices for the time being. I looked high and low for some sort of help/how-to and did not find one. If you succeed, I'd be very interested in how you set up postfix. -John On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 10:33 AM, Jef Driesen <jefdrie...@hotmail.com>wrote: > > Hi, > > I'm trying to setup a mailserver for a small home network. But before > going into the problems, let's start with a description of the situation. > > My network is a typical home network with a cable modem and a dynamic ip. > There is no domain name or mx records. All users on the network have > existing mailboxes provided by my ISP. Those external mailboxes are > downloaded with POP3 (fetchmail) and delivered to a local imap server > (dovecot). The main purpose of the local imap server is to have a > centralized mail store that can be accessed easily from any machine on my > network. > > With some help from a dyndns account, I can even access my imap server > from outside my network. This works great, except that I can't send mails > from outside my network. Therefore, I would like to setup an smtp server > that simply forwards all mail to my ISP. > > The first and main obstacle I encounter is the fact that I don't have a > real domain name. I know I can configure some fantasy name: > > myhostname = barracuda.home.lan > mydomain = home.lan > myorigin = $mydomain > mynetworks = 127.0.0.0/8 192.168.0.0/24 > mydestination = $myhostname localhost.$mydomain localhost $mydomain > relayhost = [smtp.isp.tld] > > But I wonder if it's possible to setup postfix without a domain name at > all. For all other purposes (ssh, etc), I'm just using the non-fqdn > hostnames (e.g. user@machine), and that works perfectly. > > According to the docs, I'll also need the smtp_generic_maps setting to map > fantasy names to real addresses. But in my case, users should use the real > adddress directly. Any outgoing mail with a fantasy name may simply be > blocked. To my users, it should appear as if the local smtp server isn't > even there. Is this possible, and how can I achieve this? > > All the other settings like SSL and SASL I can easily figure out, but this > domain name stuff is causing me lots of trouble. > > Jef >
