Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 17:13:12 -0700 (PDT) From: John Goodleaf <goodleaf@goodleaf.net> To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Brief Book Review: Running qmail Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0008291634150.48345-100000@clyde.goodleaf.net>
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I thought some of you might be interested in this book. Just got this from fatbrain.com (never Amazon). It's from Sams publishing; I'm usually suspicious of their books, but this one looked interesting, and since I can't wait to dump sendmail it was a must-buy for me. I mention it here because the author actually uses FreeBSD 4 as his example platform. There's plenty of Linux talk also, but FreeBSD gets most of the airtime. In fact, the book comes with a CD with FreeBSD and qmail etc. on it. Structurally, the book is a little odd, as though the publisher and author have no idea who the target audience is. The book actually begins with several chapters of background on email itself (which I actually found informative), UNIX and Linux, including discussions of the nature of the respective kernels. It then launches into installation and from there to use, configuration and administration. This strikes me as odd in that in order for someone even to know what qmail is, he or she generally has a decent background in *nixish things, and yet here's this strangely truncated intro to *nix. It is hard to see why most of the introductory chapters are really necessary at all, excepting the material on email. However, once you get clear of the beginning--and I admit to having skipped some sections--the book becomes pretty useful and clear. It is loaded with snips of screen output and well-done flow diagrams. Let me stress that these are pretty basic, great for me, probably beneath many of the folks on this list. There are lists of all the qmail modules and their functions, and lists also of the many configuration files associated with these modules. There are some good bits on the maildir system and ucspi-tcp--the package containing tcpserver. The author includes sections on testing remote and local delivery and some ideas on how best to troubleshoot. He also discusses, in reasonably good depth, how to use qmail in an ISP-like environment, including hosting mailing lists and at the other end of things, how to use qmail as a PPP dial-in server. There are chapters as well on LAN environments, "Office" systems as the author calls them. I haven't finished reading it yet, but so far I've found it to be very helpful to me, a relative newbie. I have some doubts about the structure of the book, for example, the placement of the sendmail-qmail migration chapter after all the installation, testing and administration chapters. Why put it there when most users who would be interested, that is, who have running *nix systems have sendmail already? Much of the material in the first few chapters needs either to go, or to be more fleshed out. That is, the book needs to be more introductory or much less introductory. As it stands, its organization seems somewhat half-assed. So it's not the perfect book, but I'm shifting to qmail with its help. I'll let you know how it goes/ -j =============================== John Goodleaf goodleaf@goodleaf.net PGP key: finger John@clyde.goodleaf.net =============================== To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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