Slashdot Mirror
Sendmail On IBM Mainframes Running GNU/Linux
raffe writes: "Cnet reports that Sendmail has released a version of its e-mail server software that can run on Linux-powered IBM mainframe computers. In one benchmark test, IBM found that it was possible to house 2 million e-mail accounts on a single server, with 10 percent of the users accessing their mail at any given moment" For some reason though, IBM zSeries machines aren't listed at pricewatch ;)
its just less buggy than sendmail.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
This makes the ultimate spamrelay.. ;)
Hopefully, this kind of result will show the skeptics that there's a real purpose for the big boxes.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
If only I could convince our sysprog to give me an LPAR on ours.
GNU\Linux?
Is that like Linux?
a beowulf cluster of these :)
_,-%/%|
_,-' \//%\
_,-' \%/|%
_,-' __,--
_,-' _,-'%(% ; %)%
_,-' _,-' %\%, %\
_,-' _,-' '--%'
_,-' _,-'
_,-' _,-'
_,-' _,-'
_,-' _,-'
_,-' _,-'
_,-' _,-'
_,-' _,-'
/ / ) _,-'
\__/_,-'
SUCK IT.
Important Stuff:
...And in another benchmark test, IBM was also proud to announce that the massive I/O and processing infrastructure of its flagship zServer range was able to sustain 2 million Sendmail security holes, with 10 percent of the holes being exploited at any given moment...truly a new world record.
a Beowulf cluster of these?
I just can't help it. I tried but damn it I just keep on shocking the monkey. What should I do?
...when I see mainframes running Exchange.
--
I like to watch.
its not GNU/Linux , you stupid jerk, its
ll llllllll ll lll l l xxx xxx
lll llllll llll ll lll lll xxx xxx
lll ll lllll ll lll lll xxx xxx
lll ll lll ll ll lll lll xxxxx
lll ll lll lll ll lll lll xxx
lll ll lll lllll lll lll xxxxx
llllllll llllll lll lllll llll llll xxx xxx
llllllll llllllll ll llll lllllllll xxx xxx
ll llllllll ll lll l l xxx xxx
lll llllll llll ll lll lll xxx xxx
lll ll lllll ll lll lll xxxxxx
lll ll lll ll ll lll lll xxx
lll ll lll lll ll lll lll xxx
lll ll lll lllll lll lll xxx xxx
llllllll llllll lll lllll llll llll xxx xxx
llllllll llllllll ll llll lllllllll xxx xxx
Timothy, go suck it !
OS/390 USS ("Unix System Services") has had a sendmail port for a long time. Can't speak to its performance -- we only use it for low volume outbound mail -- but it *is* sendmail.
___....---"""".
." ". S \
/ \ e i
i i i
i__ _ i n i
" "\\ i i
|| i d i
__.// i _ . - "i
\ i- " i
i ii m i
\ / i i
"._.--"i a i
i i
i i i
i _i
i l _.-"
i _.-"
i-"
Even more good GNUs here(?tm?). If you see these guise, FEEl ?free? to warn them, that they are about to get GNUked.
Check here for the prices. :)
2500 separate instances at $500 for each
Wow.
___....---"""".
." ". S \
/ \ e i
i i i
i__ _ i n i
" "\\ i i
|| i d i
__.// i _ . - "i
\ i- " i
i ii m i
\ / i i
"._.--"i a i
i i
i i i
i _i
i l _.-"
i _.-"
i-"
There was an article in the April 98 Byte that went into the advantages of mainframes over PC's. Too bad the print archive aren't online anymore. When you buy a mainframe, you are buying support. Having the OS crash on a PC is an event that, while rarer than in the recent past, is still fairly common. Yes, even with Linux. When it crashes you reboot and, if you are unlucky, reload from backup. Having the OS crash on a mainframe is a dire event that results in a team of engineers being put on the next flight out to your site. The same applies to hardware problems. PC's have uptime measured in months ,and sometimes years. Mainframes have uptime measured in years, and sometimes in decades.
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No end user can access their mail with Sendmail, it's a mail transfer agent for relaying mail, intra or inter-node.
Mail access means reading the end-user spool through the usual MUAs and support daemons: Pine, Elm, mail(1), imapd, pop, etc.
End users do use sendmail to relay mail, but they can't access their own mail that way.
The test was of 400,000 users, not 2 million; the 2 million number is a projection that has not been tested.
If we're going to pretend we're journalists, let's pretend we took at least one semester of it, shall we?
pacman doesn't have a tail!
Great... $500 for the OS and $1,200,000 for the hardware... Did you read past the link?
I think I'll stick with Intel based machines for now. Much better for ANY budget.
This thing costs 1.2 Million dollars! Image what I could build with 1.2 million in cheap clone hardware... I think I could do at least twice as much processing, and include the pop/imap servers.
oh. for a moment I read "house" as "hose" million email accounts.
If microsquish could get over the embarrassment of admitting that NT will never be able to do the job, they could redeploy hotmail on IBM equipment, and make it worth using.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
...about needing 5 computers for the entire country may become true soon.
It brings a tear to my eye. *sniff*
its super pacman, dumbass.
No. There will be 4 computers needed.
One for the water supply chip at Vault 13.
One for the air system at Vault 13.
One for the power supply at Vault 13.
One for the databases at Vault 13.
Oh, of course they are only needed after that Win XP crash at the new US missile defense system.
it looks like TP to me
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
OK, many of you have probably noticed a lot of ascii art flooding this board lately. You're no doubt wondering why CmdrTaco's much encountered "lameness filters" are ineffective against it. To answer that question, I'm going to take you on a Perl journey, deep into slashcode. Think of it as being a bit like "Heart of Darkness", or if you're a typical slashdot pleb, "Apocalypse Now!"
The first files we'll be looking at are the infamous "bitchslap" and "modslap". I think these are a pretty decent introduction to how Rob's mind works when he's coding angry: Here's bitchslap [slashcode.com]. Scroll down to the section labelled "main program logic". BTW. "main program logic" is a ridiculously grandiloquent phrase for what we are seeing here.
Note how draconian this is. I like to think of this code as a memorial to slashdot-terminal, it's first victim. You can see how Malda deliberately broke his "self-regulating" moderation system, to give the admins of slashdot dictatorial powers. This code allows any admin using it to drop a user's default threshold to -1 instantly, and drop his karma down to a level from which it is unlikely to recover. I've heard that this script has been used on slashdot in a modified form, with the -defaultpoints set to less than -1, completely eliminating a user's post from normal viewing, unless people edit their query string manually.
On to modslap [slashcode.com]. Scroll down to "main program logic" again.
OK, what you're seeing here is Taco's method of restricting the flow of crack to moderators, to keep them nice and jumpy. If you don't mod the way he likes, you're moderating days are over, and your karma plummets to bitchslap levels. An ugly tool.
To recap, the man we are dealing with here is obviously an anti-democratic tyrant. Censorship is his weapon, and he is vigilantly watching his censors, to ensure that no freedom is allowed to enter his domain. I believe he also lives in a hut with a man driven crazy by his proximity. The hut is surrounded by skulls on poles, but the skulls face inward. Remember that.
We're nearing the locus of my investigation now. You've heard the legends, now gaze into the face of comments.pl's so-called "troll detection code!"
comments.pl [slashcode.com]: Scroll down to the section under "here begins the troll detection code".
You may be wondering why it's such an ungodly piece of crap. I feel that we are seeing evidence of an ingrained unwillingness to think before coding.
The first few tests are fairly simple, based on regexps and length. They're pretty laughable, from an information theory perspective. If you don't believe me, the parent of this post should supply adequate evidence of what I'm talking about. Language is a complex thing, and a few simple tests are insufficient to distinguish English from ascii art, especially when the ascii artists are willing to take extreme measures to see their work posted. Regular posters do not have the patience for such chicanery.
The final test is my favourite, though. It begins under the comment ending with this charming sentence: "These ratios are _very_ conservative a comment has to be absolute shit to trip this off". An interesting claim. Considering the number of posts I've tripped this filter on, without doing anything out of the ordinary, I'd say "conservative" means the same thing to Taco as it means to George W. Bush, nb. "nazi". What we are talking about here, is the postercomment compression test. (The horror! The horror!) "postercomment" is just the name of the field your comments are sent in, by the way. It isn't cool top secret slashspeak. It's just a variable name.
What this does is, it actually compresses you're comment using zlib, then checks the change in size to decide if you are a troll or not! Furthermore, the code comments indicate that if you trip this test, slashcode thinks you are a "luser". Code like this makes it pretty clear that it takes one to know one, Rob!
As someone who as actually seen Rob Malda use the phrase "it won't scale" to dismiss questions about why parts of the moderation system weren't done in a more equitable fshion, I'd like to take this opportunity to laugh until I give myself a hernia.
Anyone who has studied information theory knows that the redundancy of english is estimated at about 50%. This value is fairly key in what we are seeing here, it determines a fair estimate of how effective compression of english text can be before we start to lose information. Taco's estimates were based, in his words, on "...testing out several paragraphs of text...". Doesn't sound like a particularly large sample group. What's more, it's indicative of poor software engineering practice. As is the recent bout of outages.
A few final criticisms. Firstly, there are far better, less memory intensive, and above all, less stupid methods of performing textual analysis than checking it's compression ratio. If Taco had any idea about computer science, he might have investigated a few before making a fool of himself in public like this. It's pretty clear that he's getting more and more frustrated with the situation on slashdot, and doesn't realise that if he ruled with an even hand, rather than a bitchslapping script and an army of trained thought police, the problems would not be so grave.
Secondly, I thought of a much more effective method of eliminating asci art posts, and it will never cause problems for genuine posters. What's more, it's extremely compact and doesn't even require regexps. I won't reveal it here, as I am not willing to assist in a reign of terror that I find to be reprehensible.
As further evidence of the lengths Malda and Co. may be willing to go to, you can find a commented out section that enables the deletion of posts and their descendant threads. We have no reason to believe that this will not be employed on slashdot.
Editorial notes: I don't use Perl and this is really the first time I've examined it closely. It's pretty much convinced me that I'm not missing much. I use real languages such as C and C++ and occasionaly asm to do most of my work, and I, along with 95% of the enterprise world, find Java to be the best solution for web programming. For most scripting tasks, shell script suffices. For more complicated scripting tasks, Python provides a more sensibly designed scripting environment. Additionally, as if to provide further evidence of Malda's incompetence as a programmer, I've hit the junk character post every single time I've previewed this comment, and am now forced to resort to edit it. Regretfully, I have been forced to replace the Perl fragments I was using with hyperlinks. Very unsatisfactory.
Hey, cool! Microsoft now has a solution to their Hotmail scalability issues!
The Troll is not bothered by facts or the truth. Facts can be used to support any argument. The Troll argues without facts, using misattributions and out of context - or completely invented (though rarely inventive) quotes.
This sort of thing makes sense for mid to large shops, and well funded small ones.
A million dollars for a mainframe IS a lot of money. You could buy a thousand commodity PCs and get ten times the power. It would also use 100 as much energy for each of their power supplies and the AC to cool off the 200,000 watts an hour of heat they produced. They'd also take up 50 times as much space.
Small form factor or rackmount cased would cut that problem in half. It would also triple the price. So now you left with 300 odd rackmount systems. But you need standby/fail over reliability. So you use load balancing software, and, statistically speaking, you have 1 server failure per day that you need to swap a hard drive or other out - reboot.
Acceptable? Sure, but why bother with the PCs when you can just get 1 mainframe, which has a dozen redundant CPUs and power supplies of its own? Server support is provided with the mainframe, even consulting service and configuration. Not so (without paying even more for the equipment vs. commodity PCs) with the thousand headed hydra solution.
It also lets you give everyone their "own" virtual server to manage themselves, root and all, without them thrashing the rest of your customers raqs.
The real question is, can your spring the $100k entry price for a mainframe? If so, it is a VALUE, without being cheap, whereas the add another server
Maybe I've been smoking too much crack, but I though CmdrTaco stated one short week ago that Linux should not be referred to as GNU/Linux?
.8 => [30,44],
.5 => [45,99],
.4 => [100,199],
.3 => [200,299],
.2 => [300,399],
.1 => [400,1000000],
Fuck the lameness filter, here's something really lame, courtesey of Slash:
# interpolative hash ref. Got these figures by testing out
# several paragraphs of text and saw how each compressed
# the key is the ratio it should compress, the array lower,upper
# for the ratio. These ratios are _very_ conservative
# a comment has to be absolute shit to trip this off
if (!$bad) {
my $limits = {
1.3 => [10,19],
1.1 => [20,29],
};
# Ok, one list ditch effort to skew out the trolls!
if (length($$comm) >= 10) {
for (keys %$limits) {
# DEBUG
# print "ratio $_ lower $limits->{$_}->[0] upper $limits->{$_}->[1]<br>\n";
# if it's within lower to upper
if (length($$comm) >= $limits->{$_}->[0] &&
length($$comm) <= $limits->{$_}->[1]) {
# if is >= the ratio, then it's most likely a
# troll comment
if ((length(compress($$comm)) /
length($$comm)) <= $_) {
# blammo luser
$$error_message = slashDisplay('errors', {
type => 'compress filter',
ratio => $_,
}, 1);
editComment('', $$error_message), return unless $preview;
$bad = 1;
last;
}
}
}
}
}
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
If you for some reason you needed 2500 linux server (google?) you could buy 1 IBM mainframe, run 2500 instances of fully capapble linux servers on it, each in their own firewalled sandbox.
That's where the $500 figure came from. There is no OS charge, and unlike MS, no per user/server/kb data tax.
Did they use Specmail2001 (from http://www.spec.org) to generate the load on their MTA? If so, I don't think that 400k is that special.
I've generated very close to that number (minus 100k) with a dual 1Ghz cpu w/1Gb ram system, and a Netapp F820 for storage with the Syntegra Intrastore product. I even had the close to the same CPU utilization they had. This is user space CPU of course. The system CPU time is higher due to the NFS overhead.
Once I get around a linux 2.4.x virtual memory problems, I'll publish the results to the spec.org site for everyone to see.
http://intrastore.us.syntegra.com
I got an account on the z series developer box where I get my own virtual server and compiled qmail, bind, etc, etc. Why did they have to release a special sendmail to run on it? Did they simply cross-compile it?
use closes priportary source code like os/390
then you'll have non oe the sendmail cracker holez
in ur mainframne!
While we're on the subject, if IBM is so gung-ho about open standards, why haven't we seen any Lotus file formats documented? It sure would be nice if I could load up all those WordPro and 123 documents using Abiword and Gnumeric.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I read an article that Sendmail, Inc., uses IBM Mainframes for their development anyway.... Sounds to me like IBM just convinced them to sell/support the product natively on that platform.
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
How come IBM doesn't at least try to use Postfix? I mean, Postfix is an IBM-funded thing, and was developed to be the, quote, "IBM Secure Mailer"...
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
I met a guy who worked in a mainframe shop. He said that one day an engineer showed up to fix the machine. They didn't know it was broken. Apparently it reported a problem to the home office, which dispatched a tech to fix the problem.
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NT
It came up behind while the big boys of Unix were standing in their circle peeing at each other.
In corporate-land, the ones that have mainframes already and are facing huge IT costs and a recession, the ones who are winning the mailboxes are Exchange and Notes. They had virtually no share 10 years ago, now they have lots of network share. They also cost a lot to run (Gartner says $25+ per mailbox per month).
Now here's a company that runs on Unix, that has an IMAP server that can scale HUGELY on one (or many) boxes. That can give Secretary Joe the ability to do the admin on his group's 100 users and do that for 200 groups so that the system admin can do more important things than deal with adding a mailbox for this month's temp receptionist.
QMail? Postifix? Who? Go talk to the CEO's, the stockholders. Given Dan's support group a call at 4AM when your TLS mail isn't working right or general stability of the organization, this isn't a choice for those who don't really want to spend all their money running their computers.
Recall that when you're trying to run mail for 500+ people, there just aren't a lot of options out there. Notes and Exchange tack on the IMAP letters on their product and claim it supports standards.
For those in the Real World, take a look around at how many actual standards based tools there are with solid commercial support.
So Sendmail's MTA, IMAP server and Webmail client run on the Mainframe!? Bitchin', now I have something to counter those MSCE's who claim that we must run Exchange to survive.
sendmail doesn't give users any "access" to their mail ... do you mean that it runs a pop/imap server as well? I imagine it well could
I provide permission to grasp my buttocks.
I would like to marry you, but am in impoverished country (can not say which for the government monitors all communication). My parents wish to sell me for the price of five strong oxens, but you must arrange to leave me out of the country. If you come to here, officials in the government will allow you to take home me to your country for the price of twelve strong oxens. Five strong oxens to my parents and twelve strong oxens to the government and you can take home me to your country for us to be married.
Please help me, peoples in my country are dying. I am using country's only Internet terminal (I trade oral sex for Internet access) and may not be using able to it again for large time, so please reply soonly!
Of course you're looking at the suprime icon of reliability. Why do you think that banks rely on them for all their processing? A bank can't afford downtime or lost data...
For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
I'll be impressed when I see mainframes running Exchange.
Aw, now, why would you want to go and do that to a nice mainframe? :-) If you really want to "run Exchange" on a mainframe, give Bynari a call. They've ported TradeServer to Linux/390. So yes, you can move your MS-Outlook users to Linux/390-based email. Today! Just ask Winnebago - they're doing it.
"Software available for ten years runs on Linux" ... What next? "BASH Shell runs on AMD K6!"
Timothy, you pushover!
"And like that
and as tommorow dawns and the hundreds of /. reading beemers trickle in and scan slashdot while waiting for Lotus Notes to load up their mail file there will be a cacophony of anguished screams as the poor abused geeks are left stammering in their seats trying their best to explain why the corporation still insists on loading them onto windows based domino servers (excepting those at the IBM Rochester facility who are lucky enough to be housed on AS/400 based domino servers instead).
(Don't get me wrong folks, domino is a great database and colaboration tool, but that's just NOT what is needed for an email solution.)