October 1, 2023

Email Filter Appliance Installation


Today I will show you Email Filter Appliance (E.F.A) Installation. We can install EFA on CentOS 7 minimul install. Either we can use the CentOS ISO Or we can Download the ISO Provided by E.F.A. Before installation, we have to meet some requirements, to run the System in Production mood. Systems hardware must be capable to handle the Scanning operation smoothly, so allocating proper hardware resource is important, and systems hostname/domainname, SeLinux needs to configure properly. Below we discussed the followings :


1. System Requirements.
2. System Preparation.
3. EFA Installation Methods.


1. System Requirements.

On the Official Page, they mentioned a minimum Installation requirements, like this.

  • A dedicated system for eFa4
  • CentOS 7 (minimal install preferred)
  • 2 CPU’s
  • 100GB of hard-drive space (SSD highly preferred)
  • 8GB memory (dedicated)

But, we may need to allocate more resource to the system, because Spam Filtering & Virus scanning both are CPU and I/O Intensive workload, more RAM and I/O will be necessary if the scanner handles large amount of mail per hour.


2. System Preparation.

Before Installation we need some system preparation, to run the installation smoothly and After Installation to Run the System In production mood.

1. Hostname & Fqdn
we are assigning our EFA systems hostname as “efa” and domain name is “mailserverguru.com” So, the FQDN will be  “efa.mailserverguru.com”.

# Assigning System Hostname
hostnamectl set-hostname efa
# Now Check the Hostname
hostname 
# Assigning Systems FQDN
vi /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1        localhost.localdomain    localhost
192.168.99.204   efa.mailserverguru.com   efa
//saving the file
:x
# Now Check the Domain Name and FQDN with the following commands.
dnsdomainname
hostname -f

2. Disable Iptables

During Installation EFA will connect to several mirrors and download a lot of packages, For Smooth Installation,  We need to disable IpTables for now.

systemctl stop firewalld

3. SeLinux Configuration

We need to set the SeLinux in Permissive mode, if we disable SeLinux, EFA installation script will complain and Stop proceeding.

# Changing SELinux to Permissive Mode Permanently.
 
vi /etc/selinux/config
 
# This file controls the state of SELinux on the system.
# SELINUX= can take one of these three values:
#     enforcing - SELinux security policy is enforced.
#     permissive - SELinux prints warnings instead of enforcing.
#     disabled - No SELinux policy is loaded.
SELINUX=permissive
# SELINUXTYPE= can take one of three two values:
#     targeted - Targeted processes are protected,
#     minimum - Modification of targeted policy. Only selected processes are protected.
#     mls - Multi Level Security protection.
SELINUXTYPE=targeted
 
//saving the file
:x
 
 
# Now Reboot the System.
shutdown -r now
 
 
# Now, Check the SeLinux Status.
sestatus
 
SELinux status:                 enabled
SELinuxfs mount:                /sys/fs/selinux
SELinux root directory:         /etc/selinux
Loaded policy name:             targeted
Current mode:                   permissive
Mode from config file:          permissive
Policy MLS status:              enabled
Policy deny_unknown status:     allowed
Max kernel policy version:      31


3. EFA Installation Methods.

EFA provides 2 methods for installation.

1st, One-Step Install, EFA can be installed with a single command, just run the following command as root:

curl -sSL https://install.efa-project.org | bash

2nd, Detail Install Method, you can download the installation script then observe the script for anything you like to change and finally, run the script to Install EFA.

wget -O build.bash https://install.efa-project.org bash build.bash

Please see the video above, for step by step installation of Email Filter Appliance



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