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20 Network Changing Products
An anonymous reader wrote to mention a Network World piece about products that have changed networking over the last twenty years. From the article: "SendMail 1998 - Sendmail was key to the e-mail revolution because it was how everyone got up and running with e-mail communications over the Internet. Eric Allman wrote the original version of this open source mail-transfer agent while he was at the University of California at Berkeley in 1979. He stopped development on it in 1982, however, and didn't revisit it until 1990. In 1998 he founded SendMail to sell the software's first commercial version, the SendMail switch."
From TFA:
Skype
2003
This proprietary peer-to-peer telephony application provided the first real quality VoIP product (did we mention it's free here?) that has built a cult following and spurred industry questions about why corporations can't move to convergence more quickly. Skype picked up both business clout and deep pockets when eBay bought the company in the fall of 2005
Hello? Asterisk anybody?
Open source? Check
Open standards? Check ( note: skype is not open in this regard )
Quality product? Check check check
Huge business impact? Check
Not to mention asterisk isn't burdened with weird restrictions fueled by marketing concerns. Digium is the company behind it, and they do make hardware that works with it, but it's hardly locked down to *that* specific hardware.
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Am I missing something? How did Widows 2000 Server "change" networking? They mention AD, but if that's the case then LDAP could've been listed just as well. Claiming that Windows was susceptible to Code Red is no big deal either. You could claim the Morris internet worm had a longer lasting effect on networking in the long run.
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There are a number of things wrong with that article (Sendmail Switch was largely a non-event AFAIK; the original sendmail was the "big moment"). However, Linux being the first (at least first major) fully Open Source system is probably correct.
At the time Linux was started, the BSD code base was still tied up in the AT&T lawsuit. Some parts had to be removed from distribution, leaving an incomplete system. The various BSD based projects had to rewrite some bits to fill in the removed stuff to get a working OS. IIRC Linus has said that if that hadn't been the case (or if GNU Hurd had really come about as planned), he never would have started his own kernel project.
Early Linux distributions pulled in a good bit of GNU, BSD, and X/MIT licensed code and integrated it (at least to some extent). Nobody else had really pulled all the various bits together (and GNU and BSD didn't have a functioning kernel at that point).
This article, like most articles of its type, contains misleading generalities and outright factual errors.
1) Apache was NOT the first free web server. Both CERN httpd and NCSA's httpd predate it, and both were free.
2) Netscape and Spyglass's version of Mosaic were the first commercial WEB BROWSERS. The article states that both were the first commercial GUI's. Last time I checked the first commercial GUI was to be found on the Xerox Star circa 1981. Terminology matters, when you do not use a term correctly you create confusion and/or make yourself look like an arse.
The problem with these sorts of articles, and the magazines in which they appear, is that they're being written by journalists. I can't tell you the number of times over the years that I've had the misfortune of reading something computer related in a magazine or newspaper and discovered multiple serious factual errors. I've come to accept this from periodicals that don't normally deal with computers or technology, but I'm pretty much fed up with finding errors in PC magazine on a regular ongoing basis.
Who are the people who write these articles? There are some people who are interested in computers but aren't quite there yet in terms of their understanding. Many are not blessed with "the knack" (http://home.pcisys.net/~tbc/sounds/dilknack.wav) Others are so blessed, but are still neophytes. Either way they're very good at creating and passing on erroneous information about computers and technology.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Cabletron and Synoptics were the two major leading competitors as proprietary Ethernet over twisted pair moved to 10BaseT. As I recall, Synoptics sold more and innovated more, but Cabletron kept them honest, especially on price. SynOptics did the heavy lifting on the 10BaseT spec.
tom
isn't the cf file only used at load time?
.cf file is used whenever the sendmail binary is run - on some systems this meant whenever a local user sends email.
The
As another poster pointed out, Sendmail is more than just a SMTP daemon.
At one point, every mail server was an open relay, because that's just the way things were done, and few people abused it and it was nice. Then the spammers came and ruined that. Sendmail changed to default to `don't relay' approximately as fast as everybody else. From time to time spammers have found ways around the anti-relay provisions, but this has happened with other MTAs.
As for virii, I'd argue that if a program sends an email from sytem A to user B, it's the MTA's job to, by default, deliver the email if it's properly addressed and such. Virus scanning can be added it you want, but it certainly shouldn't be there by default.
I don't think people quite think this. But it runs on *nix, so it can't be all bad.The top 10 Linux distros, according to DistroWatch.com, and their default mail servers are:
So the score is eight non-sendmail to two sendmail. Three if you count Fedora and Red Hat separately, which seems reasonable since Ubuntu, Debian, Knoppix and MEPIS are counted separately (Red Hat doesn't show up in the distrowatch top ten list, which seems strange). A better way to look at it, of course, is by market share, but decent market share figures are nearly impossible to obtain.
It appears to me that however you count it, the GP is right in saying that most Linux distributions/installations do not use sendmail by default. They all have a /usr/bin/sendmail utility, of course, but that doesn't mean they use the sendmail package.
Of the major Unixes, it appears that Solaris, HP-UX, IRIX, and the BSDs use sendmail, but AIX and OS X Server use Postfix, so sendmail appears to be the winner there.
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