Installing prerequisite packages

[Bruno Melloni]

Hi,

Although mailscanner is quite well documented, it has a chain of
dependencies of other packages that are not quite as clear
(SpamAssassin, a virus scanner, sendmail, CPAN's Net:DNS, Razor or DCC,
MRTG, etc - plus an eventual O/S hardening with Bastille to keep a
hacker from undoing our antispam work).

So far I installed the obvious ones and they appear to be working
(sendmail-8.11.6-3, mailscanner-3.21-1, spamassassin-2.20-1 rpm) since I
get the mailscanner and spamassassing header lines.   The next step
appears to be installing the virus scanner (I'll use f-prot since it is
free for home use), Net::DNS spamassassin module and Razor.

I have a couple questions:

1) Am I missing any steps?  Should I install yet something else?

2) Since I installed spamassassin from RPM, could the Net::DNS module or
Razor have been included already?  How can I check?

3) Has anybody written yet an install & configuration guide that lists
all the independent pieces to download, install and configure (and in
which order)?

4) Have I interpreted correctly that with mailscanner 3.21-1 all
spamassassin configuration is done through the
/usr/local/MailScanner/etc/spam.assassin.prefs.conf and that I should
just take the defaults in all the spamassassin-provided config files?

5) Am I overkilling by enabling in sendmail
FEATURE('blacklist_recipients') and FEATURE('dnsbl')?  These seem to be
already handled via the spam.assassin.prefs.conf file.

6) Do any ports other than SMTP (25) and Ident(113) need to be open on
the mail scanner box?  Or in other words, does mailscanner or any of the
prerequisite packages depend on ports for their operation?

7) Is there a way to check that the virus scanner got called?  I just
installed f-prot (and updated the mailscanner conf for it), seems to run,
but I see no indication in the logs nor headers that the virus scanner
actually got called.

Sorry about so many questions, but they are kind of important when doing
a real-life setup and I couldn't find answers anywhere.  Maybe some of the
answer could be added to the FAQ?

Thanks,

Bruno