Groupware Server With Group-Office, Postfix, Dovecot And SpamAssassin On Debian Lenny (5.0)

Introduction

1. The Debian Linux operating system (http://www.debian.org)
2. Group-Office for managing the mailboxes and groupware functions like e-mail, shared calendars, file sharing etc. (http://www.group-office.com)
3. Postfix with virtual accounts in MySQL . (http://www.postfix.org)
4. Dovecot IMAP (http://www.dovecot.org)
5. SpamAssassin spam filter(http://spamassassin.apache.org)
6. A vacation perl script that will handle out-of-office replies

Set up the Debian installation

Download the Debian 5 net installer and install the base system. Just follow the Debian installation instructions and install as little software as possible. You can get Debian at http://www.debian.org.

When you got Debian up and running run the following command to install all the required packages:

apt-get install php5 php5-mysql php5-imap php5-gd php5-cli php5-curl apache2 postfix postfix-mysql mysql-server mysql-client phpmyadmin subversion dovecot-imapd libemail-valid-perl libmail-sendmail-perl spamassassin spamc zip tnef libwbxml2-utils sudo openssl pyzor razor rsync mailutils libmime-charset-perl libmime-encwords-perl

Set up Group-Office

Now that all the required software is installed we can setup Group-Office. Get the Community or Professional version from: http://www.group-office.com. You need at least version 3.01-stable-2.

Unpack the tar archive:

# cd /var/www
# tar zxf groupoffice-com-3.01-stable-2.tar.gz
# mv groupoffice-3.01-stable-2 groupoffice

Create a directory for the Group-Office protected user files:

# mkdir /home/groupoffice
# chown www-data:www-data /home/groupoffice

Create a directory for the Group-Office public files:

# mkdir /var/www/local
# chown www-data:www-data /var/www/local

You can choose 3 different locations for the config.php file that is used by Group-Office:

1. Inside the Group-Office source directory (/var/www/groupoffice/config.php)
2. One level higher then the Apache document root (/var/config.php)
3. In /etc/groupoffice/[Apache server_name]/config.php

It's best to keep the config.php file out of the source directory. This way you can upgrade easier later. We will make apache the owner temporarily so that the install script can write to it.

# touch /var/config.php
# chown www-data /var/config.php

Now launch http://your.server/groupoffice/install/ and follow the instructions on screen. Choose "Create new database" and use the root user to create a new database called "groupoffice".
When you've completed the installation you must change the ownershop of the config.php file.

# chown root /var/config.php

Edit the Group-Office config.php file and add:

$config['postfixadmin_autoreply_domain']="autoreply.example.com";

Make sure the domain matches with the vacation transport of postfix you will add later.

Now Group-Office is up and running!