Simplifying Antispam for Mac OS X Email Servers
MPP has long been a great antispam solution for Mac OS X email servers and gateways, but it has also been quite difficult to install for the busy admin. We have racked our brain on this for years and we have finally come up with a solution that goes a long way to fixing our installation issues. Further improvements are on the way, but I am really psyched about how far we have come.
Before I present the solution I want to give a little background to the problem. There are 2 components to MPP, MPP Core and MPP Manager. MPP Core has been easy to install for many years, it is just a matter of running the DMG installer for MPP and then a configure script. The configure script sets up the email server to work with MPP and sets basic settings in MPP’s configuration. The problems with getting MPP installed have mostly been related to MPP Manager or in previous iterations of our GUI (Webmin module, qReview).
The GUI controls for MPP have depenencies that we required users to install. The dependencies were a include Perl modules and 2 system libraries - expat, an XML browser, and GD, a graphing tool. Perl modules can generally be installed with CPAN, a menu driven command line utility and the libraries required source downloads a simple compiles. If your eyes are glossing over and you are ready to go back to check your favorite web site again then you are not alone. These tasks are foreign to many admins and frankly, Apple hasn’t made it any simpler. Typically a few Perl modules will fail compilation and the standard GD library won’t compile on OS X. Beyond that, unless you add a compiler on your server from XCODE, you will not be able to compile anything on OS X.
Fortunately for Apple users, there is a wonderful organization, Macports, that makes installing standard open source software easier for Mac OS X admins, but even this is too complicated for many to explore. Macports allows admins to install libraries and perl modules that have been tailored for Mac OS X. It is similar to yum or up2date on Linux and is an incredible resource. Any Mac OS X administrator that is not familiar with Macports should take a minute to explore it. I know that Apple wants to hide the terminal from you but you can really unlock the power of OS X on the terminal.
So finally, after years, we have gotten the message from our customers or potential customers and created a DMG installer for MPP Manager that installs all necessary libraries and perl modules pre-built. No more compiler, no more Macports, no more CPAN, no more nothing, just double click and install. When the installer is done Safari is automatically opened to the MPP admin link. It is the simplest installation of MPP GUI tools ever and I hope you will have the chance to check it out soon.
If you want to give it a try, please give it a try:
Mac OS X PPC
ftp://ftp.raeinternet.com/pub/mpp3/beta/mppmanager/mppmanager-1.1.1-osx.ppc.dmg
Mac OS X Intel
ftp://ftp.raeinternet.com/pub/mpp3/beta/mppmanager/mppmanager-1.1.1-osx.i386.dmg
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