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Date:      13 Feb 2001 10:40:41 +0100
From:      Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@ofug.org>
To:        Neil Blakey-Milner <nbm@mithrandr.moria.org>
Cc:        "Edward W. M." <edward_wm@hotmail.com>, dominic_marks@hotmail.com, freebsd-security@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Secure Servers (SMTP, POP3, FTP)
Message-ID:  <xzpn1bqc44m.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no>
In-Reply-To: Neil Blakey-Milner's message of "Tue, 13 Feb 2001 09:32:40 %2B0200"
References:  <LC4-LFD104zkps49rAG00000067@hotmail.com> <20010213093240.A40761@rapier.smartspace.co.za>

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Neil Blakey-Milner <nbm@mithrandr.moria.org> writes:
> On Mon 2001-02-12 (15:51), Edward W. M. wrote:
> > > Mail Options:
> > > 1. Qmail - Secure, written for FreeBSD (Qwest?), Fast, Configurable
> > I would advise against qmail, as I've had reliability issues with
> > it.
> Like?

I can't speak for Edward, but here are some of the reliability
problems I've run into with QMail:

Stock QMail (without the large-queue patches) will not handle even
moderate loads gracefully. For some inexplicable reason (read:
gratuitious design flaw), directories which ought to be split into
buckets aren't, so you end up with flat directories holding one file
per queue entry. Also, the default number of buckets (23) is
ridiculously small, unless you're just setting up qmail on your DSL
box to handle mail for yourself, your four months old kitten, and her
pet rock.

Once hell has broken loose, repairing broken QMail queues is fairly
non-trivial. Even moving a broken queue aside and later merging it
into the running queue is nearly impossible without some heavy
scripting; the documented way of doing this is to compile and install
a separate QMail installation configured to run from a separate
directory and process the secondary queue.

If you decide to change the number of hash buckets, there's no
supported way to rehash a queue; the documentation says to let it run
dry before switching, or run two installations of QMail in parallel
(as described above) until the old queue has run dry.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smorgrav - des@ofug.org


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