Smtp authentication against other server

[deivid]

Hi,

I've been trying to find a way to authenticate against a remote server different from this where qmail is installed, smtp auth. I mean,

I have a mail server (A) with qmail installed as a mail server. I also have other server (B) with a qmail server installed on it. I need that when a smtp request is received by (A) server, this one authenticates this request against other remote server (B). This second server (B) has all the allow mail accounts, and as soon as A server receives a smtp authenticate request, it would have to authenticate this request asking to B server, if B server allows this mail user, A server relays this smtp request to B server in order to be delivered by B.

Hope you understand me what I need to do, I know that sounds weird but I definitely need to do this.

Thanks in advance

Regards,

deivid

 

[thedaver]

What method of authentication does B use?

D.E.R. Management - IT Project Management Consulting

http://www.dermanagement.com/

 

[deivid]

Hi thedaver,

Smtp is supporting tls authentication and plain text authentication.

Server is also using courier-imap with plain text authentication (it doesn't allow tls auth) and as I'm using Plesk control panel I discovered it's using this method:

MAILDIRPATH=Maildir
AUTHMODULES="authpsa"
MAILPASSWD="/var/qmail/users/poppasswd"

Hope this helps you.

Thanks thedaver

 

[thedaver]

I'm not familiar with the poppasswd authentication module, but I'll speculate that it's checking against a local users password file (perhaps passwd/shadow?) and determining if the password provided is correct?!

You have two immediate options with that assumption...
1) Add those local users from B as local users onto A and continue to maintain them as adds/deletes/modifies occur over time.
2) Attempt to NFS mount the authentication files from B as a local folder on A and try to use the same authentication module with an appropriate data source path change to examine the NFS mount.

Alternatively you could reconfigure both machines to use a MySQL backend for authentication credentials which would much more easily allow both a local (B) and a remote (A) to request the authentication from a common source.







D.E.R. Management - IT Project Management Consulting

http://www.dermanagement.com/

 

[deivid]

Hi,

thanks a lot, sounds good, I'll try your suggestions, but I have a last question about it, can I reconfigure qmail to be able to authenticate everything through mysql without checking shadow/passwd files?


Thanks again.

David

 

[thedaver]

I'm sure you can. Try googling or talk a walk through

http://www.qmail.org

Normally I'd be more authoritative if you were using vpopmail, but I know qmail without vpopmail can still authenticate through other modules via PAM or a SQL dbms. I just don't know the specific implementation details...

D.E.R. Management - IT Project Management Consulting

http://www.dermanagement.com/

 

[deivid]

Ok,

thanks for your help..


David