Gateway Installation Guide: Introduction

Warning

This guide explain how to install the CipherMail gateway community edition. For instructions on how to install the Enterprise edition, please contact us.

This install guide explains how to install CipherMail on Ubuntu, Debian, RedHat, CentOS and SUSE. The .deb and .rpm packages have been tested on Ubuntu 20.04, Debian 10, RHEL8, CentOS Stream and SLES 12. It is recommended to install CipherMail on a dedicated and clean machine.

Tip

Commands that should be executed from the command line start with the $ sign.

Requirements

  • PostgreSQL, MySQL or Oracle

  • Postfix

  • OpenJDK 7 or 8

  • ANT

  • Tomcat (or Jetty)

Systemd Journal Rate Limiting

CipherMail logs it’s output to Journald. Journald will start dropping log messages if the number of log messages from a process exceeds some limit.

A message similar to the following will be written to the logs if messages are dropped:

May  11 10:00:00 gateway journal: Suppressed 7124 messages from ...

To increase the limit at which message will be dropped, change the following journald settings: RateLimitInterval and RateLimitBurst

Rsyslog Rate Limiting

CipherMail logs will be written to CipherMail specific log files using Rsyslog.

Rsyslog will start dropping log messages if the number of log messages from a process exceeds some limit.

To increase the limit at which message will be dropped, change the following Rsyslog settings: imjournalRatelimitInterval and imjournalRatelimitBurst

Core OS package

A package (rpm or deb) can contain a list of required packages. When the package is installed, the package manager (apt, yum, zypper…) checks if all required packages are installed and if not suggests to install the required packages or refuses to install the package.

While providing a list if required packages is helpfull, it is however impossible to create a package which can be installed on different Linux versions/distributions and at the same time provide a list of all required packages. The main reason this is impossible, is that the list of required packages differs between different Linux distributions/versions.

In previous version of CipherMail, the packages did not provide any package requirements. Before installing the packages, the administrator had to make sure that all required packages were installed. From version 5 and up, the CipherMail core packages now depend on a virtual OS dependency package named ciphermail-core-os. The virtual OS dependency package provides the list of required packages.

Currently there are 3 virtual OS dependency packages all providing the required ciphermail-core-os package

  • ciphermail-core-os-debian

  • ciphermail-core-os-rhel8

  • ciphermail-core-os-no-deps

ciphermail-core-os-debian is for debian based systems (Debian and Ubuntu), ciphermail-core-os-rhel8 is for Red Hat 8 based systems (RHEL8/CentOS 8 stream).

ciphermail-core-os-no-deps is a special package. The ciphermail-core-os-no-deps package provides the required dependency ciphermail-core-os without providing any additional requirements. If ciphermail-core-os-no-deps is installed, the CipherMail package dependecies behave exactly as it was in versions ≤ 4, i.e., no additional dependencies.