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Date:      Mon, 25 Mar 2002 09:46:30 +0100
From:      Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be>
To:        Tim <tim@sleepy.wojomedia.com>, Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be>
Cc:        Taylor Dondich <thexder@lvcm.com>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: qmail (Was: Maintaining Access Control Lists )
Message-ID:  <p0510150eb8c48ba6b1f4@[10.0.1.8]>
In-Reply-To: <20020325015236.A97552@futuresouth.com>
References:   <F61GQUEYvZmDvHbYxPo0000a6bd@hotmail.com><20020323002608.B20699@ra <p05101505b8c430e28572@[10.0.1.9]> <000c01c1d3ab$6d2c6960$6600a8c0@penguin> <p05101509b8c47b17d088@[10.0.1.8]> <20020325015236.A97552@futuresouth.com>

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At 1:52 AM -0600 2002/03/25, Tim wrote:

>  You are kidding right?  It looks to me that you are completely blinded by
>  your disdain for Dan.  You don't think Postfix took a lot of design hints
>  from qmail?  qmail is one of the most modular systems out there.

	Wietse saw qmail, and saw that there were a whole host of things 
wrong with it.  Moreover, he also knew that the author was 
intractable, and there was no hope of ever getting any of these 
problems fixed.  Since he needed to have a subject for a particular 
chapter of his upcoming book on "secure programming" that he is 
writing with Dan Farmer, he took this subject matter and began the 
VMailer project.  This later became the program we now call postfix.

	IMO, qmail is modular in the same sense that a hammer is modular 
-- you can use it to bang on whatever you want.  Hmm, make that a 
rock, and not a particularly sturdy one.


	I'm sorry, if you haven't been doing Internet mail for around a 
decade or so, and you haven't personally gone toe-to-toe with Dan 
when he gets on one of his whacked-out kicks, you just don't have the 
experience that you would need in order to be able to defend your 
position.

	Contrariwise, anyone who has crossed swords with Dan, or seen one 
of his many irrational tirades, can easily provide their personal 
evidence of his behaviour problems.

>>  For example, you can't use the standard inetd that
>>  ships with your system, you are instead forced to use his tcpserver.
>>  And heaven help you if you need to do something that isn't covered by
>>  his tools, because Dan sure won't.
>
>>From the INSTALL file on a qmail-1.03 distribution
>
>  16. Set up qmail-smtpd in /etc/inetd.conf (all on one line):
>  	smtp stream tcp nowait qmaild /var/qmail/bin/tcp-env
>  	tcp-env /var/qmail/bin/qmail-smtpd

	Try that with tinydns or dnscache.  I was talking about a general 
philosophy that Dan applies, not necessarily the specific 
implementation found in qmail.  Moreover, you still haven't answered 
the issue of the size of the configuration file, or the number of 
lines required.  Can you actually do anything useful with any program 
written by Dan in two lines of configuration file?

>  the qmail user community is more than sufficient for support.

	Riiiiiiiiiiiiiight.  Just like C makes a perfectly good macro language.

>  I like Postfix myself, but you are so blatantly biased I am not sure you
>  are any better than what you are accusing Dan of.

	I loathe and despise Dan, that is correct.  I am perfectly honest 
and upfront about that.  And because I do not trust the author as far 
as I can bodily throw his planet of residence, I do not trust the 
code that he writes.  Moreover, because of the reality distortion 
field that he seems to manifest, I also don't trust anything 
associated with any of the programs he writes.


	I've been using Unix and the Internet since 1984 -- almost twenty 
years.  I've been administering Unix and the Internet since 1989 -- 
thirteen years.  I've been doing DNS and Internet mail system 
administration since sometime around 1991, so about eleven years.

	In that time, I have been the Technical POC for disa.mil, I 
helped set up the DOD CERT (assist.mil) in just seven days from mere 
concept to operational reality (at a time when there was just a 
single NIC, and the root zone was only updated once a week), I was 
the Postmaster and Internet mail systems administrator for over 
10,000 users on the DISAnet network, and one of my "customers" was 
the Milnet Manager himself (Major Dave Paciorkowski at the time).  I 
was also responsible for turning in a number of Class A and B network 
numbers that were not being used, as well as convincing the SIPRnet 
folks (the people on the classified side) that they should use the 
DNS and not HOSTS.TXT files, and that they should use real network 
numbers assigned by the NIC, in case there ever was a time in the 
distant future when they were connected to the real Internet.

	I have also been the Sr. Internet Mail Systems Administrator for 
America Online, responsible for providing technical leadership to the 
team administering well over a hundred servers that provided the 
e-mail gateway to/from the Internet for millions and millions of AOL 
customers.  I also designed what is probably still the worlds largest 
caching nameserver farm while I was at AOL, benchmarked at being 
capable of handling 32,000-64,000 DNS queries per second.

	I have also been a Sr. Consultant for Collective Technologies, a 
leading Unix/Internet consulting firm in the US.  While at CT, I 
consulted for a number of companies, including some of the largest 
freemail service providers in the world.  I have also been the 
Systems Architect for Belgacom Skynet, the largest ISP in Belgium.  I 
have given classes on DNS for the company Men & Mice, using material 
written by Cricket Liu (and I will be doing so again at SANE 2002). 
I will soon again be a Sr. Consultant, this time for Snow BV in the 
Netherlands, another leading Unix/Internet consulting company in 
Europe.


	In all the time I've been in this business, and with all my 
hard-earned experience, I have found damn few programs that can stand 
up to the rigors of the kind of work that I have done.

	With regards to being a general-purpose MTA, sendmail is at the 
top of that list, especially with recent improvements that allow it 
to be as fast or faster than anything else on the planet.  I also 
have very high regard for postfix, and I have heard a lot of good 
things about Exim (although I regret that I have not yet had an 
opportunity to do any work with it).  I have had more or less 
negative experiences with every other MTA that I have encountered, 
and qmail ranks below dog poop in my book.  IMO, you would literally 
be better off flinging canine excrement than using qmail.

	With regards to nameservers, there simply is nothing else 
publicly available to compare with BIND.  Yes, some companies have 
developed internal nameserver programs that they have used to help 
them provide service at an unequalled level (e.g., Nominum), but 
those programs are not publicly available.  Of the programs that are 
available, BIND wins hands-down.


	If you can show me a comparable level of experience and talent on 
your part, then I'd be very interested in having a private in-depth 
discussion on the relative merits and demerits of various programs 
with you, including discussions of detailed benchmarks that you have 
run as compared to benchmarks that I have run, etc....

	However, unless you are willing and able to function on this 
level, I doubt that there is anything you're likely to bring to this 
debate that I would find useful or interesting.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles@skynet.be>

Do you hate Microsoft?  Do you hate Outlook?  Then visit the Anti-Outlook
page at <http://www.rodos.net/outlook/>; and see how much fun you can have.

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
     -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.

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