We have no plan to raise a startup fund, or recruit a large number of employees, we just want to keep everything easily, we want an agile and smart business.
We are very proud to announce our new business website ‘Rework Studio’ here, it now provides kinds of integrated services in different area.
We appreciate you to visit it and provide your feedback to us, your efforts will make our services better, especially in this very beginning period. Also, you are welcome to introduce it to your coworkers, thank you for your support!
This paragraph is about starting up a website by buying and setting up a VPS.
We bought a ‘.com’ domain at http://www.net.cn with 139CNY/year, and a VPS from Burst.NET with 59.5USD/year. One tip is that Burst.NET supports user to choose the geographical position of VPS, 2 options are provided: SCRANTON and Los Angeles, as we tested, SCRANTON is a little faster than LA with either Shanghai or Rochester network. So if you want to buy your own VPS from Burst.NET, we suggest you to choose SCRANTON. But if you want to test speed by yourself, here is a bit more info to you:
Ping/Traceroute Test:
66.96.192.92 (Scranton)
184.82.225.2 (California)
178.238.129.83 (EU/UK)Download Test:
http://66.96.192.92/bigtest.tgz – Scranton, PA USA
http://184.82.225.2/bigtest.tgz – Los Angeles, CA USA
http://178.238.129.83/bigtest.tgz – Manchester, UK
You may chose a Ubuntu 10.4 LTS 32bit system, the VPS had set up a LAMP environment so that you can easily install your web system. The web root is under ‘/var/www’ by default, if you place a php script there, it will run up when visited via web browsers.
To access your VPS with SSH, we suggest you to use Putty which is a popular and lightweight tool with multi platform support; To copy files from local to your VPS, you may need WinSCP via SSH or Filezilla via FTP, and you need set port to 22 for both before use; To remote access MySQL database, we suggest Navicat which has powerful features and friendly user interface.
By default, VPS don’t have GCC or wget installed, you may setup them very easily with ‘apt-get install’; if you want download a package to your host, you don’t need to get it back to local and then copy to the remote, you may just use ‘wget –c http://www.sample.com/xxx.tar.gz’, the download speed of VPS network should be much faster than local.
Finally, if you got any problem when set up your VPS, you can use helpdesk by Burst.NET, before place your issues, you may need a registration first.
This paragraph is about configuring mail system on your VPS, my solution is postfix + dovecot + afterlogic.
I want to notice you that my experience is only valuable for Ubuntu 10.4, this tutorial may not work with other versions of Ubuntu!
Basically, I setup postfix and dovecot by following the official guidelines(I II), you may following them first, and then I will figure out some common issues with my work around.
1. enable log for postfix, postfix uses system log, and rely on rsyslog service, so if you can’t find mail log files ‘/var/log/mail.*’, you may check installation of rsyslog and ensure it’s activated. See here for more info on debugging postfix.
2. add a mail user, the mail service use system user mechanism, you may add a new mail account with ‘useradd xxx –g mail –s /usr/sbin/nologin’, and set password via ‘passwd xxx’; if system don’t automatically create ‘/home/xxx’, you may create it yourself, and set proper permission with ‘chmod’ and ‘chown’.
3.a bug on configure dovecot profile, if you error log shows ‘Plugin cmusieve not found from directory /usr/lib/dovecot/modules/lda’, you may reconfigured dovecot profile, and install sieve on your system, see this article.
To me, the work around don’t fix my problem, I did the same configuration on ‘/etc/dovecot/conf.d/01-dovecot-postfix.conf’ too.
Here is a list of sample configuration files by myself:
/etc/postfix/main.cf
/etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf
/etc/dovecot/conf.d/01-dovecot-postfix.conf
You can setup a MUA such as Outlook for test, in server side you may trace the error log to gather more error info, you may also use ‘telnet’ to test SMTP and POP3 service separately.
The last thing is about setting up web mail system, I chose AfterLogic web mail system. You can complete most deployment by following the instruction at official website; the only issue is about mapping email address format to system account format, since my web mail attempted to login with a mail address, such as ‘xxx@reworkstudio.com’, but in fact I just need ‘xxx’ part.
The AfterLogic helpdesk figured out my mistake, I changed the settings.xml and set UseLoginAsEmailAddress to ‘Off’, then my web mail worked.
If you have any questions, you may place a topic at AfterLogic helpdesk system, guys there are very kindly to help you out the problem.
That’s all, thanks for your reading.
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