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Postfix
Fortunately, my first needs were simple and I came to realise that Postfix was a much easier system to install and maintain. Now that my needs are more complex, I was glad when this book hit my desk at exactly the same time as I started upgrading the corporate servers from Mac OS 9 to OS X Server.
Postfix: The Definitive Guide seems to fit the bill. It is a well-written and well-constructed guide to mail systems in general and Postfix in particular. (Oh, and speaking of definitive, could someone at O'Reilly provide a definitive answer to both reviewers and their own editors as to that colon? This is the second 'Definitive Guide' I've reviewed in as many months, and they are sprinkled with instances of each book's title, sometimes including that colon, sometimes leaving it out.)
The book starts with a good overview of the underlying technology in Chapters 1 and 2. I can't blame Dent for my slight confusion in the section on addresses and headers - having RFC822 superseded by RFC2822 was just a little too much coincidence for this particular "bear of little brain." He then follows it with a chapter discussing Postfix's architecture, important since Postfix uses a much more modular approach than the sendmail monolith, with each part of the mail handling process a different executable and the single queue turned into five.
Once the background is well covered, Dent then gets onto the nitty-gritty of configuring and administering Postfix. He has certainly covered everything I needed, including spam handling, multiple domains, relaying, SASL authentication and using LDAP. Once I'd finished grokking all that, and getting it integrated into my servers, I had a corporate email system up in three sites that replaced and improved upon a couple of thousand dollars worth of proprietary dreck. Happy is an understatement.
Dent's writing is sometimes a little patchy, though never bad. The technical detail does seem overpowering in places, though, and I occasionally found myself reading a section through more than once with a configuration file open in front of me. There are certainly spots where a little more hand holding and care with the writing would have been appreciated. (If you are a little more cognizant of the interstices of mail systems then you may not have the same problem.)
I did, however, appreciate the appendices enormously. The four appendices cover configuration parameters, Postfix commands, installation, and an FAQ. My system came with Postfix compiled and installed just as I required it so I didn't get a chance to thoroughly test out Dent's installation procedure (though it looks good); the other three continue to be useful.
If you want to have a look for yourself, then the usual O'Reilly page is complete with a table of contents and index, but this time no example chapter is provided (how come, O'Reilly?). You can also get an expanded version of the FAQ in Appendix 4 from Dent's website. A better example of Dent's writing style is an excellent article on troubleshooting with Postfix logs at O'Reilly's Onlamp.com.
This is an excellent book, Dent has explained the underlying methodology and use of Postfix well, taken the reader through all aspects of this MTA system and explained both the why and the how. I would recommend this book (and, as a result Postfix) to anyone looking for an MTA and a guide to configuring and running it.
You can purchase Postfix: The Definitive Guide from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I had always wondered how he managed to have so much time to read all these different books, and then on top of reading them, writing a pretty nice review of it.. the following line explains it all to me:
;)
I was glad when this book hit my desk at exactly the same time as I started upgrading the corporate servers from Mac OS 9 to OS X Server
And I'm posting this anonymously because I know there are many of you who wondered the very same thing..
yeah.. that was about where I gave up on this review. Anyone that runs MacOS 9 as a server ... not someone I think I'd be taking advice from for my network.
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o d h i
the great Qmail/Postfix flame war has.
This guy is way out there
to the dustbin of history the better.
Q. Why does the 'sendmail book' have a bat on the cover?
A. The diet of the North American brown bat is principally composed of bugs. Sendmail is a software package principally composed of bugs.
or;
A. Bat guano is a source of ammonium nitrate, a principal ingredient of things that blow up in your face, like sendmail.
(And many others, courtesy of 'the unix haters handbook' (worth a read)).
Obviously, the people who designed the sendmail configuration file system can't have been smoking crack, it wasn't invented back then.
So what was it that they were on? LSD?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Configuring sendmail is easy!
dd if=/dev/random of=./sendmail.cf
then hit Ctrl-C when you think you have enough configuring done. Small installs need about 30 seconds, enterprise installs need a few minuites.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
---[snip]---
Postfix, it just works!
---[snip]---
"Important Stuff: Please try to keep posts on topic."
What if it's a boring topic? Like a new mailserver or something?
I thought everyone without a huge legacy setup had switched from the archaic sendmail to something decent like postfix, or qmail long ago.
I would never run qmail, and wouldn't recommend anyone use qmail.
Any program that just dies with the error message "cannot start: hath the daemon spawn no fire?" doesn't belong in an enterprise server.
Any program that just dies with the error message "cannot start: hath the daemon spawn no fire?" doesn't belong in an enterprise server.
Luckily, although qmail might have abandoned you with its error message, other F/OSS software authors have heard your plea:
To emphasize the highly professional nature of Nmap, all instances of "fucked up" in error message text has been changed to "b0rked".
( I'm half tempted to email in a patch to qmail that adds the configure flag of --idonthaveasenseofhumor )
I find it ironic that you object to the qmail log message, and yet have no problem using the name of a spacecraft from a science fiction television show to describe your business equipment.