Date: Sat, 19 May 2001 16:02:15 +0200 From: Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be> To: Jamie Bowden <ragnar@sysabend.org>, Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Opera ports to QNX but not BSD Message-ID: <p0510030fb72c28b702d5@[194.78.241.123]> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.10.10105182026310.13601-100000@moo.sysabend.org> References: <Pine.BSF.4.10.10105182026310.13601-100000@moo.sysabend.org>
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At 8:52 PM -0700 5/18/01, Jamie Bowden wrote: > While I was by no means a top sendmail expert, I could and did regularly > edit the cf file without bothering to grab the manual. I've never felt so > good about dumping something that I spent so much time acquiring skill > with. As the former comp.mail.sendmail FAQ maintainer, a guy who's been hacking around on sendmail for many years (indeed, most of the anti-spam stuff available today is directly or indirectly based on work I did while I was at AOL and contributed back), and being the only person I know of to recently present two different papers on the scaling of e-mail systems (based on sendmail) outside of employees of Sendmail, Inc. (SANE '98 and LISA 2000), I believe I can safely say that I am pretty familiar with sendmail. Indeed, I can also say that I am pretty familiar with postfix. I was involved on the mailing lists for postfix ever since it used to be called "VMailer", and I believe that I have contributed materially to the features that the program has today, as well as the way in which things have been done internally within the program. The conversion from sendmail to postfix is usually a pretty simple one. Postfix comes configured, out-of-the-box, to be about as secure as you can reasonably get, and all of the important factors have reasonable defaults assigned to them. Indeed, one of the original design goals for postfix was to be as much of a drop-in replacement for sendmail as possible, with the sole exception of the configuration file. About 99.9% of the things you might want to typically do with an MTA are relatively easily done in postfix, through table-driven techniques. While sendmail may be the best documented and most widely understood MTA in the world, I believe I can safely say that postfix has the most easily understandable MTA configuration file in the world, and newbies can easily do things in postfix that they would never dream of doing with sendmail. Moreover, because of the fact that Wietse was able to start with a clean slate and design a new MTA using 20/20 hindsight with regards to sendmail, he was able to do a lot of things in a much simpler and more straightforward manner. He was also able to do things in a way that would be more inherently secure, as well as being much more easily scalable. That said, if you have a more complex configuration, it is possible that it would take quite a bit of work to convert to a postfix equivalent, and if you're doing really esoteric things that require writing your own customer sendmail.cf rules for things that you can't normally do with sendmail, and aren't features that Wietse Venema has already anticipated, it may even be impossible to get a 100% conversion. In particular, anything with the new milter interface for sendmail is probably simply not possible to replicate with postfix. I can say that, at my previous employer, I ripped out sendmail on our outbound machines and replaced them with postfix, and did a rolling upgrade -- putting a new machine into service and then taking an old machine out (to be upgraded), one at a time. The conversion was about as smooth as it could get, and I later did the same for our front-end inbound mail servers. For simple configurations, replacing sendmail with postfix is about as trivially easy as you can get. it's the more complex configurations that may pose more of a problem. -- Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles@skynet.be> /* efdtt.c Author: Charles M. Hannum <root@ihack.net> */ /* Represented as 1045 digit prime number by Phil Carmody */ /* Prime as DNS cname chain by Roy Arends and Walter Belgers */ /* */ /* Usage is: cat title-key scrambled.vob | efdtt >clear.vob */ /* where title-key = "153 2 8 105 225" or other similar 5-byte key */ dig decss.friet.org|perl -ne'if(/^x/){s/[x.]//g;print pack(H124,$_)}' To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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