Date: Tue, 22 Jul 1997 13:41:57 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us (Alex Belits) Cc: info@pagecreators.com, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD and NT Message-ID: <199707222041.NAA14032@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.3.95.970722115258.13936A-100000@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us> from "Alex Belits" at Jul 22, 97 12:14:07 pm
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> > I am currently involved in a new Internet Presence Provider establishment > > As I understand it, "Internet Presence Provider" == Internet Service > Provider (ISP) that mostly handles HTTP servers, FTP servers, nameservers > and mail relaying, but not ISDN lines and plain modem dialins? I believe the difference is that a presence provider makes it appear that your company has a permananent internet presence. Generally, this is accomplished by virtual domain hosting; this idea is supported by the email question that he asked. This would provide you with a DNS entry for an FTP server, an HTTP server, and a mail server. Generally, as an IP alias configured for the box, and one or more mail exchanger entries in the DNS, depending on how the mail services were being handled. > > and expertise, > > most of us working on this project do not know much about Unix (only basic > > knowledge) but in turn know NT in and out. > > If you are going to use NT for a large web server, I suggest you to > choose other kind of business immediately. Not necessarily. IIS, despite it's proprietary technology, is relatively robust. Where you will fall down is in using the Microsoft Exchange mail services. The "Internet connector" for SMTP services is not sufficient for virtual domain hosting, since it uses aliases for maildrops instead of true virtual domains. The reason for this is that it attempts to keep a single copy of a mail message with multiple target addresses. If your customer is going to use a POP-lookup product, like qpopper, etc., you will be unable to provide them the ability to fan the mail back out to the local users. Specifically, there is no facility for placing an RFC821 complian "for xxx" component matching the RCPT TO: in the RFC821 exchange, since it wants to keep a single copy of the message. Per user data would interfere with this ability, unless they hired programmers who knew what they were doing. Post.Office has this same problem. Microsoft Exchange is also vanilla SMTP; they do not support the ESMTP "EHLO", or the "ETRN" extension for per domain queue dumping, as in the most recent version of Sendmail. They don't even support the dangerously insecure "TURN" command. Post.Office has this same problem. Post.Office *does* support, as of 3.1, a local ESMTP extension "XREMOTEQUEUE". Unfortunately, this command is not documented anywhere, at least that I have been able to determine. This means that using an NT machine as a Point Of Presence" mail server is not a good idea, in general. > > Also, if we were to run > > FreeBSD as a e-mail server could we easily add/delete users also specifying > > their @domain, example: mike@here.com and mike@there.com and > > John@overthere.com all on this same box? > > Yes. Yes. See the sendmail FAQ on www.sendmail.org; Section 3.7 discusses virtual domain hosting, in detail. If you are planning to have multiple user dialing in via POP, you will need a uniquifier for the mail drop. You will need to handle this via address rewriting. Alternately, you could dump them all into the same mailbox, and have the client support fanning them out to the correct users base on the "Received: ... for <user@domain>" optional header item (which sendmail supports correctly). If they are are calling in and triggering the mail queue dump via ETRN or a hacked fingerd (a common pre-ETRN hack) or via the non-standard XREMOTEQUEUE private extension, well, then you won't have nearly the problems; you'll simply leave the mail in the queue (note: MS Exchange does not have per domain queus any more than it avoids folding multiple messages for a single domain into a single message, so it can't support this without a lot of work). As a final plug (not much of one, since I am looking for work elsewhere right now), my current employer has a product called "XtraMail". It allows clients to call up to a single POP mailbox and download all the mail from a hosted virtual domain and locally fan it out; it's an ESMTP/POP3 server that runs on Windows95 and NT (server and workstation), so at the very least, you will save yourself supporting non-NT/95 clients. Support is probably going to be your biggest issue, anyway. A 60 day demo version (soft upgradeable) is availble from www.artisoft.com. Regards, Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199707222041.NAA14032>