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Date:      Sun, 14 Apr 2002 22:28:18 -0700
From:      David Schultz <dschultz@uclink.Berkeley.EDU>
To:        Gregory Keefe <keefeg@keefeg.com>
Cc:        Fernando Gleiser <fgleiser@cactus.fi.uba.ar>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Softupdates
Message-ID:  <20020414222818.A4463@HAL9000.wox.org>
In-Reply-To: <00cc01c1e3ea$03382c70$9865fea9@GPC>; from keefeg@keefeg.com on Sun, Apr 14, 2002 at 03:24:33PM -0400
References:  <20020414122514.E5464-100000@cactus.fi.uba.ar> <00cc01c1e3ea$03382c70$9865fea9@GPC>

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Thus spake Gregory Keefe <keefeg@keefeg.com>:

> Looking at DJB's claim again up top, I suspect that he desires his
> software to really "mean it" when it responds to a client saying it
> successfully received mail.  And the best definition of "mean it" in
> this context is that the mail is safely written to disk (I'd
> personally go a step further and have it safely written to a cluster
> of servers' disks, but that's certainly not reasonable for most
> environments).  If softupdates indeed compromises that feature,
> though, then couldn't a faint shadow of doubt be cast over the
> reliability of the entire default install?

Cluster of servers?  How often do you expect your mail server to lose
power or crash?  It isn't the end of the world if a busy mail server
loses a few messages per year due to crashes.  By extension of your
argument, you could say that cars kill people, and therefore it's best
to live far from cities and walk everywhere.  Granted, I'm sure you
could come up with a situation where a more conservative approach than
softupdates is appropriate, but people who manage such important data
probably don't use the default install.

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