A private BSD laboratory

I must admit that I’m going to be convinced to rebuild all my front-end SMTP servers with FreeBSD systems running Sendmail, because of some important features still missing even in the ‘SMTP Transport’ role of the new Exchange Server 2007… 🙁  I already have such a system running in my corporate production environment, running as my secondary mail exchanger system, but before completing the migration to the BSD platform I would like to accomplish some additional steps.

One of the most relevant requirements is the ability to check the RCPT TO data and verify that the recipient is actually existing and active in every back-end Exchange organization, so I have spent some time to rebuild the RcptFilter solution, as I explained in the post before. Since then, I realized that to have the access file rebuild process running on each mail server is not just the best way to sync the GAL with Sendmail, since I should allow each mail server (both internal and Internet systems) to access all the Domain Controllers via LDAP, in order to let them obtain the global address list from the Exchange organization which rely on Active Directory Services to store its data.

Thus I decided to centralize the access file rebuild process, by scheduling the perl scripts execution onto the Windows Server 2003 R2 system built to be used by our IT Services group for their administrative, monitoring and management tasks. After the access file is rebuilt (everyday at the 12:00 AM), it is compressed and published on a web server to be accessible to all my FreeBSD systems, which simply have to fetch and unpack it, then to rebuild the access.db file and restart the Sendmail daemon.

So my centralized RcptFilter system is ready to run, now I only wish to bind a virus scanning engine to Sendamil before making it my first and unique SMTP Internet relay system!