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Reporter RHNID:
Section: -
Language: en-US (English)
Workaround:

Description: The current design of this exercise is still a bit hard for students to follow. Bug RH254-338 doesn't help the situation.

My understanding of the student view of how this exercise works:

• Student will configure Postfix on serverX.example.com as a nullclient which canonicalizes the domain on all outgoing e-mails to desktopX.example.com and submits all e-mail to smtpX.example.com for relay/delivery
• The student tests that they successfully did this by using mutt to send an e-mail to student@desktopX.example.com.

Behind the scenes:

• It looks like smtpX.example.com is another name for desktopX.example.com, so as soon as it receives the test e-mail it should pass it to the local MDA for delivery. This may complicate the lab design.

In a way, this lab is designed backwards. It'd be reasonable to configure desktopX as a nullclient, because it's a desktop, it shouldn't be delivering e-mail to the local system. The thinking is probably that serverX should represent a web server that's not a mail server and shouldn't accept mail.

Ideally, I think this lab would be clearer if:

• The exercise configured serverX as a nullclient.
• The smtpX.example.com system is not desktopX.example.com, but running as a container or VM as an apparently separate system
• smtpX.example.com delivers mail somewhere other than desktopX (referred to here as "mailX.example.com"
• We used something other than "desktopX.example.com" as the mail domain. This argues that perhaps we need to reconsider whether students need their own subdomains for this course.
• The chapter lab still repeats this exercise, but configuring desktopX as the nullclient instead of serverX (which we configured in the walk-through practice exercise).