Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2000 02:14:16 +0100 From: Brad Knowles <blk@skynet.be> To: Fabio Miranda <fmirand@yahoo.com>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: postfix Message-ID: <v04220803b65b294cc812@[10.0.1.3]> In-Reply-To: <20001211215145.3073.qmail@web108.yahoomail.com> References: <20001211215145.3073.qmail@web108.yahoomail.com>
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At 1:51 PM -0800 2000/12/11, Fabio Miranda wrote: > I would like to know why freebsd.org uses postfix > beside of sendmail, being sendmail a team also from > berkeley and with same style of development? > how could freebsd.org do that? i made an effor for > understand how sendmail works and i use it in my site > and i hope someday be in touch with the development. The five things that you generally care about in an MTA (or most any program) are: 1. Security 2. Speed 3. Robustness 4. Ease of configuration & maintenance 5. Ease of monitoring Classicly, the open source version of sendmail has failed more or less on each of these points. Alternative programs such as postfix have tended to do better, because they can take the lessons learned in sendmail and avoid making those same mistakes, while they start from a clean slate. More recently, open source versions of sendmail have significantly improved in many of these areas, but you can at least still argue that alternative programs such as postfix still continue to win, at least when you're talking about default configurations (or configurations not too far away from the default). Of course, if you know what you're doing, you can configure the open source version of sendmail to perform at or above the levels provided by virtually any other program on the planet -- see my paper at <http://www.shub-internet.org/brad/papers/sendmail-tuning/>; or Nick Christenson's paper at <http://www.jetcafe.org/~npc/doc/performance_tuning.pdf>. Now, if you're willing to talk about commercial MTAs, the guys at Sendmail, Inc. have done some *OUTSTANDING* work on the monitoring and maintenance sides of sendmail. During the two years I was Senior Internet Mail Systems Administrator at AOL, we cobbled together all our own tools on top of things like ssh, rcp, rsh, Tivoli, our own custom agents running on each machine, etc... and we *never* approached the virtually trivial ease that these guys have gotten things down to. Believe me, I am not a GUI person when it comes to being an admin -- you'll never see me use admintool on Sun Solaris, SAM on HP-UX, smit on AIX, etc... and you'll never see me use web-based administration tools like webmin. I've been in this business for far too long to do that sort of stuff. Yet, when I see what the guys at Sendmail, Inc. have done for making graphical administration and monitoring easy and powerful, I realize just how much of a dinosaur I have become. Having seen this stuff, I don't ever again want to generate my own sendmail.cf files with m4, I don't ever again want to distribute and update sendmail.cf files with ssh/rcp/rsh/etc..., and I don't ever again want to try to build my own network monitoring system with rrdtool, UCD SNMP, custom scripts to get to the things UCD SNMP can't do, etc.... So, it all really depends on what you want to do, how you want to do it, and what you're willing to do to get there. For those with short memories, I would remind you that sendmail also got its start with BSD, while at Berkeley (long before FreeBSD was even a glint in someone's eye). I would also remind you that the softupdates code you're all so very happy with comes from Kirk McKusick, who is Eric Allman's partner. -- These are my opinions -- not to be taken as official Skynet policy ====================================================================== Brad Knowles, <blk@skynet.be> || Belgacom Skynet SA/NV Systems Architect, Mail/News/FTP/Proxy Admin || Rue Colonel Bourg, 124 Phone/Fax: +32-2-706.13.11/12.49 || B-1140 Brussels http://www.skynet.be || Belgium "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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