Hello to all and thanks to Josh and all the contributors to Mail-in-a-Box.
Background: I’m evaluating Mail-in-a-Box as an email solution for several small charitable organizations, a small for-profit business, and my own use (which mixes charitable and paid work). So far, it seems like a nice fit. I’m at the stage where I’d like to set it up and kick the tires for a couple of months, completely on its own, to see how much work it will be to maintain.
Opinion: One reservation I have is everything that Mail-in-a-Box offers that isn’t directly related to email. From a security stand-point, I’d really like to opt out of NextCloud and the static website. The DNS integration makes sense, but certainly caught my attention. I have to disagree with the discussion of making Mail-in-a-Box capable of controlling LXC guests. Frankly, setting up Mail-in-a-Box is more involved than setting up NextCloud or a static website.
Just focus on email.
And with that, I’ll reserve further opinion until I’ve got Mail-in-a-Box up and running.
You can manually disable NextCloud, although unsupported.
Also LXC is an unsupported mod for MIAB, stock, it cannot do that.
If you are looking to rid MIAB of NextCloud, DNS, and Static site hosting you have severely missed the point of MIAB. MIAB is an “AIO” solution for specific situations. If it is not for you, Zentyal might (which can be customized.
It seems to me that the specific situation MIAB is aimed at is email. My evidence: The project’s name.
My main issue with the non-email services included in MIAB, and let me be clear that this is not my hill-to-die-on, is that it may conflict with pre-existing services an organization may have. For example, nearly all of the organizations I work with already have a website and DNS. The first question I had once I figured out that MIAB also did DNS and static websites, was whether it would conflict with existing services (which it will) and how it can be worked around (which it can, fairly easily).
In my perfect world, MIAB would actually be a set of decoupled services, probably running in their own containers, all with a web front-end, and an NGINX proxy tying them all together. But the world ain’t perfect and I’m just fine with that.
But I’ll digress until I have some actual experience with MIAB.
The name being irrelevant to the issue at hand, if MIAB does not suit your needs, then I would urge you to instead of telling someone to change there software because you want it, is to do one of the following:
Fork MIAB and make your own version that does not handle DNS, web, & cloud (which btw MIAB does not NEED to do - It only offers the options. DNS using an external provider and MIAB is very simple, and supported setup and so is external web hosting.)
Use a different server for your mail and not use mailinabox (SoGo, Zentyal, Nethserver, etc).
Use MIAB as-is, but disable the features you do not like, want, or need.
The best part about Linux is you can change it to suit your needs. Don’t need DNS? disable the service. Don’t need web hosting? Disable the service. It’s that simple mate. All I was informing you about is:
A) Josh will not do as you suggest (and was heavily discussed in previous posts)
B) What you are looking to do by removing the services is an unsupported modification and not many will help you here.
To disable the MIAB webhosting just set an “A” record in the custom DNS page to an external (or non-existant) IP Address for the domain you want to disable it for.
For DNS Hosting, after you are done installing, see the “System -> External DNS Page” to use MIAB as a secondary DNS server instead of the Primary.
So my apologies if I came off as offensive, that was not my intention. But I hope this post helps!
I hear you, both here and now as well as in the installation page and video. With a bit of luck, I’ll be testing it out this evening…but probably tomorrow.
To be clear, my posts were only intended to be one grain of sand on the scales that influence development. Frankly, your reply was more than I expected.
Offensive? Not at all. I get that you were trying to explain something. At worst, you were responding to things I really wasn’t saying, which is easy to forgive. How would you know that I’ve been running Linux since 1993 and don’t need the benefits of open source software explained to me? Someone else might read the discussion and take something positive away from it.
I get that my needs may not exactly align with existing MIAB users or developers, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t state what would be perfectly aligned. Make no mistake, in no way am I demanding any kind of change. That would be pretty ballsy, given that I haven’t contributed to it in any way…or even installed it.
As for Everything else, nice, I always enjoy meeting someone who has been running Linux for a long time.