11. Installing Network Clients

11.1 Installing Email clients

Installing Mailx

• Unpack the Mailx archive and install it by running

make; make install

Installing Mutt

My favorite email client is Mutt, so that's why we're installing this one. Feel free to skip the installation of Mutt and install your own favorite client. After all, this is going to be your system. Not mine.

If your favorite client is an X Window client (such as Netscape Mail) then you'll have to sit tight a little while till we've installed X.

• Unpack the Mutt archive and install it by running:

./configure
make; make install

Installing Fetchmail

• Unpack the Fetchmail archive and install it by running:

./configure
make; make install

Testing the email system

It's time to test the email system now.

• Start Sendmail by running /usr/sbin/sendmail -bd (you need to start sendmail using the full path. If you don't, you can't let sendmail reload the sendmail.cf by running kill -1 <sendmail pid>).
• Send yourself an email by running echo "this is an email test" | mail -s test root
• Start the mail program and you should see your email there.
• Create a new user by running useradd -m testuser; passwd testuser
• Send an email to testuser by running echo "test mail to testuser" | mail -s test testuser
• Login as testuser, try to obtain that email (using the mail program) and send an email to root in the same way as you send an email to testuser.

If this all worked just fine, you have a working email system for local email. It's not necessarily ready for Internet yet. You can remove the testuser by running userdel -r testuser

11.2 Installing FTP client

Installing Netkit-ftp

• Unpack the Netkit-ftp archive and install it by running:

./configure
make; make install

Testing FTP system

• Start the Pro ftp daemon by running /etc/init.d/proftpd start
• Start a ftp session to localhost by running ftp localhost
• Login as user anonymous and logout again.

11.3 Installing HTTP client

Installing Zlib

Zlib is a compression library, used by programs like PKware's zip and unzip utilities. Lynx can use this library to compress certain files.

• Unpack the Zlib archive and install it by running:

./configure --shared
make; make install

Installing Lynx

• Unpack the Lynx archive and install it by running:

./configure --libdir=/etc --with-zlib
make; make install
make install-help; make install-doc

Testing HTTP system

• Start the Apache http daemon by running /etc/init.d/apache start
• Start a http session to localhost by running lynx http://localhost
• Exit lynx.

11.4 Installing Telnet client

The Telnet client has already been installed when we installed the Telnet daemon in the previous chapter.

Testing Telnet system

• Start the Internet Server daemon (and with it telnetd) by running /etc/init.d/inetd start
• Start a telnet session to localhost by running telnet localhost
• Login and logout again.

11.5 Installing PPP clients

Creating the connect script

• Create a new file /usr/bin/pon file containing the following:

#!/bin/sh
# Begin /usr/bin/pon
 
/usr/sbin/pppd call provider
 
# End /usr/bin/pon

Creating the disconnect script

• Create a new file /usr/bin/poff file containing the following:

#!/bin/sh
# Begin /usr/bin/poff
 
set -- `cat /var/run/ppp*.pid`
 
case $# in
  0)
    kill -15 `ps axw|grep "pppd call [[allnum:]]+"|grep -v grep|awk '{print $1}'`
    exit 0
    ;;
  1)
    kill -15 $1
    exit 0
    ;;
esac
 
# End /usr/bin/poff

Testing PPP system

• Connect to the Internet by running pon
• Try to connect to a site like http://tts.ookhoi.dds.nl/
• Disconnect from the Internet by running poff

Other resources

For a detailed document on how to configure your system for Internet, I recommend you reading the ISP-Hookup-HOWTO which you can download from the LDP site at http://www.linuxdoc.org/