OK, as is usual first time for a new workshop we had some issues with the PCs we are using for practical work! Mostly they are lovely machines and the lab is very comfortable with great projection facility, but using a piece of software that isn't already set up proved troublesome when it came to Putty, our chosen ssh client for connecting to servers :-(.

We all set up key pairs for secure access to the servers (good practice to minimise hacking by ssh) and needed to be able to use Putty with a private key file which was on a flag drive—but the network setup in the lab confounded us and we reverted to normal password authentication using ssh. We will stay with this for the remainder of the workshop as it will work everywhere, but at least everyone is aware of key pair authentication!

This afternoon we all logged into our group servers as the default ec2-user and proceeded to install postfix. Some issues with editing on a Linux system using vi and nano, but Christine has ensured there are reference documents in the Online resources section of this web site.

The other main issue was failure when sending a test message after installing and starting postfix. Examination of the logs suggested that the virtual users database could not be read properly and postfix was not operating as it should because of this. A simple initial build of the virtual users table with the postmap command has fixed the problem on the servers I have looked at and I will ensure that all the others are ready for action in the morning! In practice we should not have added the virtual_alias_... configuration lines in the main.cf configuration file until we were ready to use them!

The other thing I will complete tonight is set up everyone with a jambo.netskills.biz email address using the short names you sent earlier by email.

We will examine all servers tomorrow morning and make sure are all up to date with the expected workshop progress. Have your questions ready!

George