Source from David Goodwin
Install Debian
No surprise there… I installed Etch via netboot, and ended up with a fairly minimal setup. You’ll probably do it a different way. I told it to install as a ‘mail server’ and a ‘web server’. The ‘mail server’ option was probably a mistake as it installs uw-imapd and exim, neither of which I wanted/needed.
You probably want to install openssh-server and molly-guard
Postfix
apt-get install postfix postfix-mysql
(Or postfix-mysql if you’re going to use that instead)
I selected the Internet Site configuration when asked to pick a configuration.
/etc/apt/sources.list
In order to have slightly more recent versions of a few packages (PHP5, ClamAV and PostgreSQL mainly), I added the following into my /etc/apt/sources.list file :
deb http://packages.dotdeb.org stable all deb http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/backports.org/ etch-backports main contrib non-free
Install MySQL
apt-get install mysql-server
(Note: there is no requirement on using v8.2, but I’m under the impression that it’s faster than previous versions). I’d suggest you use at least v8.1 (in Etch) from a maintenance point of view.