Slashdot Mirror
CNN on Sendmail for NT
J. Pierpont writes "CNN has an article on, of all things, sendmail. The unusual thing is that sendmail for NT is not open source. The article goes on to highlight some of the security advantages that it has over Exchange Server. I still think it's odd that CNN would have an article about sendmail."
Some thing interesting about the product is that Metainfo sold the product for $450 for unlimited users which I thought was a good price. but when it was sold to the new company the uped the price to almost exchange prices and started charging per user now i cant upgrade (BugPatch) what ever with out it costing me a small fortune. Not being able to patch sendmail is a bad thing...No? Whats a guy to do? And i have to run NT
I was hoping I wasn't the only one watching the History Channel recently. That show on the code talkers was fascinating
Yeah, right. NT's sooo expensive. Sure right. Instead, let's jsut train everybody in a 20+ year old OS. Yeah, that'll save a lot of money! hahaha (ROTFL)
Unfortuantely its a fact of life that (properly)administrating an NT server setup out of the box is an impossibliity. There are so many internal quirks only taught on expensive NT courses that NT pro's have to be consulted by anyone not in the know. In short -- it sucks, so does NT,so does M$.
Sounds like that lab is incompetently administrated. Are your staff people off diddling around with the Linux kernel or what?
Exchange public folders are nice in concept but my company's Exchange took months before it was actually working with NNTP in both directions. I still get problems using newsgroups via Outlook, so I use Netscape and talk to the NNTP server directly, which works fine.
They closed the source-tree for Sendmail years ago. The sendmail most people use is a branch developed off the open sourced version from years past. -- Eric Windisch
Actually, it's very simple. There's lots of money in the NT market. People like to maker money, thus, everything goes to NT. Generally, only fanatics, academics, and incompetents waste time writing software for free.
Isn't it based on Open Source? How can something based on Open Source become closed source? And another thing, wasn't it the Sendmail maintainer who's name escapes me that stubbornly insisted over and over again on USENET that Linux would never become anything?
I also work in IT at a major computer printer manufacturer, and we have a handful of Exchange servers for around 5000 user accounts.
Those stupid things have trouble every week. This week, all of them went down on Monday, and then on Wednesday, one or two of them lost their calendaring capability.
Now this company is very much in bed with Microsoft. MS Engineers visit every couple of weeks. I would think that if anyone could keep four Exchange servers (with less than 1500 users apiece) going, it would be those guys who are trying. Guess not.
Maybe we'll go back to OpenMail....
I have no interest in extending the revolution to NT. In fact, you only extend the useable lifespan of this product by extending the ideas of open source to it. Let them live, and die, CLOSED.
Exchange is easily MS most ineptly implemented piece of software. The horror stories from companies such as TWA that tried to implement Exchange are tribute to how crappy the programming that went into Exchange. Why are they completely dropping the backend design of it if its such a great piece of software? Try OpenMail from HP.
Bullshit. Anyone who knows the least bit about NT (apparently, you don't), knows that there's been a perfectly good, scriptable, mail object for a few years now. CDONTS works just fine. Want some more features? Use CDO.
You have a bunch of people doing work for you.
You also, perhaps, support Open Source and have resources dedicated to improving the free parts.
Perhaps you also supply the source for your product.
Perhaps your company ONLY supports OSS tools and ports them to other platforms, selling support on your builds of the OSS tools (while supplying source).
Perhaps your employees all embrace OSS and are glad to be being paid to work on things that support their views.
Perhaps you run seminars teaching people how to use OSS products
You have a bunch of people you are responsible for feeding and employing. You are doing what you believe is a Good Thing.
Customers come to you, pay money for services or products.
70% of your customers may run NT, either exclusively or in a mixed environment. They may us NT because they are a shop with perhaps 10 people. Maybe their business isn't computing; they may have a garage or be a bike shop or be any of the millions of small businesses that are most of america today. In any case many people don't have or WANT computer expertise.
Further, in eastern westminster missouri, they don't know any vendors who've been around for more than 1 year who offer Un*x support (there is that kid in the next town, but word is he might leave for college next year).
they want a simple (eg. Not Exchange) mail server and MTA. You want a GUI so that the accountant, who's got a technical knack, can configure it. (and sendmail/commercial takes about 3 minutes to get up and running 90% of the time.
Or perhaps you want a supported version of a web server that works.
OTOH, maybe they have sendmail/apache/ksh whatever running on all their Unix boxes and they want it on their NT boxes too.
It doesn't matter WHY people are running NT, they do. The Linux/BSD horde is making HUGE inroads into finishing that front end that Un*x has always lacked - making it so that Mom can handle it and, importantly, so that a Help Desk level person at her ISP can walk her through setting up a new connection. But Bob Young was right when he said that Linux is still to small to beat NT soon. It will compete, but it'll be a while before NT is gone entirely from the corporate consciousness.
So if porting the product or service to NT pays for that port and, perhaps, funds continuing to improve the OSS and commercial/Unix versions: Great
Now is it more likely that a dictate will say "remove the stablely running 686/233 linux box and replace it with 4 NT boxes running Sendmail." Yeah, that will happen, it's a Dilbert World, but the following is more likely:
As clients grow, if the NT user realizes that NT just doesn't scale or isn't stable or just doesn't meet their needs, isn't it great for her to know that she can run the same tools on a 4-Way alpha running FreeBSD or a 128 way SGI or on her bosses OLD PC running Linux? Isn't that an easier sell than offering to put up 40 NT machines in parallel to run IIS or 15 machines running NT/Apache when you could use a single E4500 running Apache?
I think it's awesome. It's ray of light shining in the Dark Side.
So I think it's a hell of a good business decision to run the higher profile servers on NT. Think of it as scaling down below that 486 running Linux. Entry level. A door into the world of Goodness and Light(tm).
You run Metainfo version 1.x, sendmail patches the POP server to not suck. You want it, but the product is at version 2.5 and you haven't given ANYONE money for this product in 3 years. Are you "owed" a patch to a product that was end of lifed before sendmail, inc bought it?
And lets not forget that MetaInfo Sendmail in general was supported poorly. Checkpoint bought them out (and checkpoint's support is, er, uneven).
So yeah, I'd rather buy it from sendmail, inc, who seem to have some Clue, and get great support than spend less with an Orphan product that MI didn't seem to really understand. (that is presuming NT - I rather throw sendmail on a P120 running Un*x than use NT)
AFAIK, Sendmail/NT 3.0 is a complete rewrite that's been needed for a while.
Why bother running Sendmail on NT when you can get it on Unix? We all know that NT is garbage. Just get to the point and install Unix and forget about it.
What's worse is reading the moderation guidelines, they explicity tell you to do more encouraging of discussion through upscoring then squelching.
Most people just go power hungry with their moderation status
-- Tarnar
(posting as AC to avoid dumb moderation points affecting Karma)
Sendmail is doing just fine.
Lately, moderators are scoring things down simply because they disagree with it.
Knock it off!
Troll.
Assuming this is not a troll...
I read that you had two asses, and the second one spewed fire. Have you since fixed this?
Your question assumed that what you read was true.
Exim rocks.
wonderful app.
Steve Ruyle
Ex Libris Veritas
I remember reading somewhere that sendmail was hard to configure and had too many backdoors. Have these been corrected?
Anyway anything not from M$ would be more secure, compare NT and Linux.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
"Public folders" can be handled by any decent imap server -- say, cyrus. And Outlook can use them.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
1. You can replicate IMAP folders, too.
2. You can gate them to NNTP, but then you will lose user-level access control (just like with Exchange).
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Posted by NJViking:
:)
/var partition.
I worked for 2 years as a MS Exchange admin (4.0, 5.0, 5.5) before I wised up and took a job doing Sun Solaris
We had Microsoft consultants come in and design the network. Now get this: we had roughly 30 leaf Exchange sites in the state of NJ, but with only *1* hub. In Pennsylvania, we had 1 hub serving 1 leaf node. How screwed up was that?
Result: Exchange, furiously trying to run as its own MTA would have the NJ hub clobbered with messages waiting to get transferred. It was a total nightmare for us. (Not to mention the fact that the Microsoft consultants who set up the infrastructure for us totally screwed up.)
Sendmail as an MTA would work perfectly in this situation. I don't know how reliable it would be running under NT.
We once set up a Solaris 2.61 on a Sun Enterprise 250 and send a million messages at it with 1 meg attachments with a script. The box didn't even BLINK! The only problem which made it poop out was a full
What would happen if we aimed a million messages with 1 meg attachments at an Exchange MTA? BSOD. How about Sendmail for NT? Only time will tell..
-= NJV =-
No... They're making money selling sendmail for idiots to put on NT. There's a difference.
One's stupidity, the other is taking advantage of other peoples stupidity. Not 100% ethical, but that's capitalism for you.
Deleted
What a dumb thing to do...
Sendmail... Powerful, flexible and rock solid stability. Then you stick it on NT which has none of these attributes.
It completely misses the point.
Deleted
Okay, okay, I was being too vague. Understanding of my post depended on familiarity with Tolkien's Ring trilogy. By now you'll have either gotten the joke, or come to the inevitable conclusion that you must read the three Ring books.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
What I see is a bias in the moderation against MS informational and "from the field" articles. Most of the useful articles in this thread should have been 2, informational. Instead they are 1 or 0.
I know that /. is basically a Linux-against-the-world, a beastary of geeks type of place. And that will be reflected not only in moderation, but also meta-moderation. The problem is that we need to have a better balance, like an "experts in the field" super moderators, who can only bounce articles up to 2 (say) that are truly informational and relevant. To become a super moderator, you would have to apply, and get recognition from people to say that you are one of:
I'm not just saying this for MS products, I'm saying for everything, whether you happen to be the FreeBSD package master for a product, or a XFree86 developer (like I was), or a kernel developer. We need peer review by qualified individuals. This is not about moderating up trollish opinions, this about moderating up informational articles of any flavour.
To me, I get value from /. by giving me the devil's advocate view of MS. I work with MS products all the time - I secure and administrate them in very large sites (I'm currently working in one of Australia's largest IT sites with over 30,000 desktops directly affected by my work). I have to have a reality check from time to time, and /. is the right place for that. (rant) With the exception of the week I had off after the truly appalling Richard Stevens incident - I almost didn't come back. Who needs a community that disrepectful of someone who IMHO constitutes a stellar light in a 99.9% dark universe? He did so much for Unix, and my faith in humanity so troubled by /.'s response. (rant finished)
As you go through life (I'm all of 28, and probably one of the older people here), one of things you should learn is that you have to take into account information from both sides, knowing that some or all of that information is flawed and biased. Then you munge the data and make up your own mind. It'll still come out something like "M$ sux", but hell, you've had a think, and you've made up your own mind. Don't let anyone else do that for you.
Andrew van der Stock
In my immediate past site (I work at various sites), we had two Exchange bridgeheads distributing large numbers of tasks to 54 sites. Over a million messages a week being sent around the state to manage custom developed software. Beyond hardware failure (can't blame the OS for that one), this worked without a hitch.
Exchange doesn't BSOD with large number of messages. Exchange is generally not the cause of BSOD's - NT might do so for other reasons (bad RAM, dodgy hardware, the occasional bug check), but I've never seen one caused by Exchange. I've seen Exchange being very sick and AV all over the place, but it doesn't cause NT to crash. It's like saying that sendmail can oops a Linux kernel. Doesn't happen.
Look through the following two articles for the current cumulative bug fix list for Exchange 5.5 SP3. If anyone can find a single referenced Q article that mentions Exchange code causing a BSOD, I'll donate $AUD20 to Amnesty International. This is not about plain crashes, this about BSOD, which are different beasties altogether.
Part One
Part Two
Andrew van der Stock
Yes, Exim is definitely a nice program. Without ever having seen it, I was able to get it up and running (after a short edit of the configuration files) in 5 minutes. Compare that to the time you used on your first sendmail installation (I believe the average there is _well_ over 5 minutes...), add the fact that Exim isn't as widely used (security through obscurity in practice! ;-) ) and you have something that works very well. For anyone struggling with sendmail, Exim might be your program.
/* Steinar */
(This comment is of course GPLed.)
The worst part of this story for me is the rationalisation for it not being open source - "we can't because we now have other peoples IPR in there" (not that that stopped Netscape - they just removed the proprietary bits and then released the code).
Having been around the block on companies funded by VC, I can guess how this came about.
Man in Suit: So, how are we going to convince the stock market we're going to make money eventually?
Another Man in suit: Easy, port it to NT!
MIS: What about the Open Source issue?
AMIS: Easy, bolt some MS code in there and claim you can't release it as it contains IPR we don't own.
MIS: hur hur hur. Ok, let's do it.
Depending on how cynical you are, you could see this as checking the burn rate and thinking about the next round of VC funding.
All your ghosts are just false positives.
--
Sendmail Pro isn't news, of course, but it seems a bit sad, not to mention frustrating, that it came about the way it did.
The way I was taught in history class, Eric Allman's been the lead maintainer of sendmail for years, and has overseen it through a half dozen or so major redesigns of the config file formats, each more complex than the last, bringing it to where it's been for a while now.
Now, sendmail.cf is so painful that there are sysadmins who make a living doing nothing but sendmail configs, what with the same file having sections that are space-delimited, and others that are tab-delimited, several macro languages, several variable-assignment syntaxes, and so forth, to the point where one is supposed to write m4 macros to generate these monstrosities.
I'm not knocking sendmail's flexibility so much as what comes to look like a willful contempt for usability issues, especially when it appears the same folks behind the tangle of sendmail had no problem at all putting a clean, pleasant config toolset together once they decided to make that the distinguishing feature of their commercial version.
I'm torn on what to think of this. On the basis of the work he's done for years on sendmail, Eric Allman deserves a nice house in the hills, an expensive car, and maybe even a wine cellar and an attentive stockbroker.
But I can't help but think it might have been more sporting to release even the pretty admin interfaces under the BSD license, and build a business around support, training, certification, professional services, and so forth.
I wish the guy well, except maybe when I'm busy ripping out my hair wrestling with sendmail configuration.
Sure you can run IIS and Exchange on a p120 along with SQL server 6.5 or 7.0. But you can't do that with e-commerse stuff. I have done it for development and what not but you get a few people hitting the system and if the system is actually dynamic (don't even talk if your serving regular html pages because then you have no clue anyway) then the system will not stay up long never mind handle the load. It seams they were using the same server for E-mail, and web serving of e-commerce... good luck on a 120!
--MD--
--MD--
True; most of CNN is served off of dual-processor Sun boxes (mostly Ultra 60's and 2300's.)
CNN has a major dependency on ad serving software from Netgravity. Netgravity is not available on Linux or for Apache. (Customers of Netgravity tend to be very large sites that, like CNN, tend to run on commercial UNIX systems.)
We've been exploring using Linux for systems that don't require Netgravity, but to this point there are only a few production systems running Linux. But it's clearly something we will continue to explore and use where it makes sense.
This assumes that without Micros~1 there would have been a vacuum, which is a fallacy: The computing industry was thriving quite well even outside the (initially) limited world that was Microsoft. If IBM had chosen CP/M instead, you can bet Microsoft would have continued writing software for that platform (which they already did AFAIK), but then they would have been a smaller player, and Digital Research a major one, instead of dwindling down to a bite-size company to be swallowed by whomever (Corel?).
I mean, remember when demo versions of Doom were floating around everywhere? For some, the demo was plenty enough game, and for others, they just had to go out and buy Doom after playing the demo. I think the same thing'll happen with Sendmail. Some NT admins'll get exposed to OSS after trying it out and others will just be happy that they can get a real mail program on NT and stick with their NT boxes.
Which, in the end, is better than not making sendmail for NT at all.
Whoops, cross out "OSS" and fill in "Unix"
I think Roblimo has a point- Sendmail? NT? But I have to question the approach to this article here on Slashdot- if it isn't newsworthy for CNN, what makes it newsworthy for /.? Besides, the last thing non-AC's such as myself want to read is more 'NT sux, Linux is better'- it's a tired mantra.
Real news would be 'Exchange counterpart for Unix offered' and don't give me sendmail bs- Exchange is extremely stable when implimented correctly, and can easily house thousands of users- such as I do for a major computer printer manufacturer. sendmail isn't an option for messaging as it does not offer calendaring, resource management (scheduling) task management, or anything close- another reason sendmail for NT is lame- it lacks the features of Exchange. 'Free' is a dead issue, as licensing costs are one of the smallest factors in messaging for >3000 users.
N_P
On Linux, it isn't there yet, but its getting much much better.
COAS, the Caldera administration utilities, lets you at least change the visible domain, mail relay host, and transport method settings and whether or not the relay is is an Internet or local hub on sendmail. Anything else you need must be manually configured.
COAS strives to make config files manually editable without the breaking the COAS applets, but I don't really know how good it is with every config file, particularly sendmails since sendmail pretty much works for me out of the box, at least on my home Linux box, which grabs mail from the Internet via ESRs venerable fetchmail program. And I don't use Caldera in a production environment (at least not yet)
I agree that the port of sendmail is a good thing, even though I don't like the idea that it is closed source. Exchange Server, IMHO, has had too many security holes and it is seriously bloatware (ie it is too big/slow). I prefer implementing Unix or Linux boxen for mail servers, again because of the flexibility of configuration.
My journal has hot
With 5.5 you can alter folder permissions (and other properties) recursively for a whole branch by checking an option in the Exchange Administrator before you commit your changes. Accomplishing this under 5.0 was rather painful.
I support Exchange. I hate Exchange. But there is no open source software that can match its capabilities. Believe me, I've tried to put together something of the sort with the Cyrus IMAP server and OpenLDAP. The mail and directory thing is basically doable, but public folders and calendaring present problems. Even if there were a featureful free calendar server available, you'd still need to properly integrate it into the mailstore and get the client software to support it. Permission handling is also kind of messy. I would want to see ACLs on folders managed through the directory.
We do hand off outgoing mail to Sendmail before it leaves the company, so the MTA thing isn't an issue. I'm tired, though, of people claiming that Sendmail/Qmail/Postfix/etc is a complete replacement for Exchange and Outlook. Maybe if sysadmins were the only people using e-mail, but if that were the case I don't think e-mail would be particularly useful.
Unfortunately, the degree of integration that this sort of app calls for is currently best handled by a monolithic authority like Microsoft. A lot of standards have to be defined, and getting them all to work together would require a level of unity that the free software community has not exhibited so far. I hope to be proven wrong, of course, so I can get rid of these damn Exchange servers.
Derek
The way i see it, this is kinda terminal for sendmail, or at least should be.
Going non-open-source about it, having had an OS version for yonx, is such a retrograde step it's unbelievable, if it weren't for the fact that it's on NT.
Another, closed-source app, running on NT, in direct competition with Exchange? What are they, off their heads?
They deserve to go under, and we can then get on with using another MTA instead. Good ol' exim...
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
more choice for everyone; you run sendmail on NT, I run it on Linux. You get nice wizards; I get stability.
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
Do you terribly mind sticking to facts rather than folklore?
-jhp
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
I see this as Sendmail, Inc. realizing that their market on Unix systems is starting to evaporate.
No this is a move to make some money in the enterprise now. Sendmail is doing fine, i use it because i prefer it. As do some use qmail or exim for example.
Their act is fine. One thing sendmail has going for it is the guy who wrote the RFC for SMTP as developed sendmail. How many Unix admins are going to want to pay for sendmail when they can use a book and some time to figure it out? They know they can make more money going for NT, simple economics. Making blanket and/or inflammatory statements that something is dead or on it's way out because they ported it to NT or you don't like it is foolish.
this space for rent
first, that should be 'without testing it' in the last sentence.
thinking on it more, i think nt's problem isn't the myriad ways it can screw up- it's the lack of ability beyond a full reinstall to fix things sometimes.
Linux can break in so many more ways, it's not even funny. However, you don't have hidden DLLs, cryptic (and undocumented, usually) registry entries, or unknown Microsoft-only APIs that bugger up some other program, and you do have nice lovely text files.
Which is of course why it's important to install it right the first time it's deployed, not to touch it unless it's necessary, and to test any potential updates on a dupe of the machine.
stored on computers from birth to the grave
I'm not the expert on the whole incompetence scoop around here (since I'm not one of the 3 roots administering to the unix lab, I don't get in on a lot of the action.. *sniff*) but I know that near (or at, really) the core of the problem is the ITS (information technology services, or some crap like that) head doesn't know what they're doing, and can't understand the wonderful world of *nix.... and doesn't do a darned thing to help out the Unix lab. We are/were supposed to get new HP-UX machines for our unix lab, a better printer, etc., etc... but, _if_ we get anything, it appears we're going to be getting 486's. Goody for us. and a printer that's probably no better than the one we already have (it doesn't work). so, we're SOL. why? b/c we can't do a darned thing to get the ITS head fired, and it doesn't care a darned thing about Unix, or us. so we're screwed. (and that definitely means that they're not off doodling with the Linux kernel).
Insert mind here.
We were setting up an NT laptop to demo against a Samba box last week, and I got so frustrated just watching my boss (who actually works with NT) (my job title is Linux Specialist, I don't have to ever even boot Windows unless StarOffice can't handle the attachment) beat his head against that operating system, I finally told him straight out, "Don't ever make me program on NT. I'll quit."
... stress, I'm sure... those poor things miss each other's company). We also had 2 486's running Linux.
Yes.. I know what you mean. (well, in another form, I do)
At the school I attend, I'd say 95% + of the machines here run WinNT. We have a Unix lab with ~10 old HP-UXs that work just fine.... the only time they've been down was when power was lost (except.. we had to take down the unix lab and relocate it for renovations of the room that housed it.. and two machines got set up, and they've spazzed on us twice, and twice only
However.. the NT machines are the biggest crock of doo this side of forever. (Sadly, I'm on one of them right now). They're down more often than they're up; roaming profiles were enforced, which made login times soar to 9 + minutes; they love "System Process - Low on Virtual Memory" error messages; they like to lose user profiles so that we have to reboot them to login in the first place; the list goes on and on and on.
My beef is this: who in their right (or left, if you want to get picky) mind is going to set up an NT server for anything?!? Much less and use something that was open-sourced and is designed for the best OSes out there on some piece of crap as crappy as NT? Sheesh!
Insert mind here.
It is interesting to note that afaik, CNN runs their stuff on Sun boxes.
I am an MCSE. I worked on an Exchange 5.0 upgrade and box migration to 5.5 this summer. The Exchange interface is mediocre at best, and the inability to change folder permissions hierarchically throughout public folders drove me nuts. Public folders kinda bewildered me, as I had to ensure that data's migration to the new box and version, even though no one seemed to have added anything to them recently.
As I struggled through changing permissions and other Exchange vagaries, I realized a few things (warning blanket generalizations to follow). I am a geek. I hate writing things down. I don't and have not used the scheduling features of Exchange.
But, a *lot* of people do. Sales and marketing types love contacts folders that the whole department can interact with. Group scheduling, yadda yadda yadda. Messenging systems are not being marketed towards geeks. As a major investment, they need to offer a lot of fricking value to the enterprise as a whole. Thus, these features are becoming mandatory for messenging systems.
That said, this is why I would love to evaluate OpenMail in the future. An exchange like system runnning on Linux/BSD could be CRITICAL for OSS explosion. Remeber all those MS ads with however many thousands of users running on just one exchange box? Well, we all know that that was an alpha box. Somebody should be creating a migration path for NT Exchange alpha boxes to move to Linux or BSD / Openmail. Anyhow, Exchange like features on Linux is a huge step forward for OSS credibility in the enterprise.
matt
I share your viewpoint. I suppose after people see the quality of non-MS software, they cannot help but contemplate that if the MTA is excellent, then the other open source / non-MS /Linux stuff must be pretty good after all.
The irrestible lure of reducing TCO is a big factor too. (Though some may disagree with me, but the fact is that Linux expertise has grown by leaps and bounds recently, and is readily available. )
Be kind. There are too many mean people out there already.
Why is it good for Linux/BSD? Because it will get people started on using the good Unix utilities on NT. When there's yet another crash on the system, they'll start looking more seriously at moving to Linux/BSD, since the services they're running would be the same. NT5 would be a pointless expense, while Linux/BSD would be nearly free and more stable.
Can you imagine how long it would have taken your poor admin to figure out how to configure innd?
After the invasion of M$ HQ, we will take all their code (on 2 millioni floppy disks) and melt it once and for all for the good of the OSS community(the world also.)
...
And then we could start burning all the books we don't like as well
I used to have a sig but I left it on a bus
It might motivate some people to switch over to linux instead of windows since it's free on linux as well as open source if they want to check out the code. Of course they can see the code on a windows platform and port it over themselves but that'd require programing skills an average user wouldn't have much less would be troubled to.
~~~NO CARRIER~~~
No, actually, the company is one huge international IT department. :) It just happens that PHBs run rampant. Even PHBs, however, can be made to see the light. Usually, it involves ordering a $4,000 compaq server on company money, and then showing him the bill. The bill is cancelled, and you're sailing happily in unix-land. He basically willed the server to run on old retired hardware, and we had machines from last year's co-op students available... I didn't get a choice. I was told "make this do this." Oh. I'm glad it worked in the end, though.
I'm just convinced now that if you've got perl experience making scripts run on a unix platform, it's just PAINFUL making the scripts work in a windows box. Period. Especially if you have inadequate logging capabilities on that machine. Oh... and having an SMTP daemon which decides to kill itself after being resident for 15 minutes is also a big pain in the patootie.
You'll eat it and you'll like it.
Every coin has two sides...
Personally, yes, I would, but then again...I'm not the kind of person likely to be setting up an NT mail server.
I see your point; I guess I'm just kind of wondering aloud why someone would want to go half-way like that. I mean, if you're an all-Microsoft house, I would think you'd be running Exchange, so you can use those nifty proprietary Exchange features.
Otherwise, I would think someone who is already thinking down the lines of not tying themselves exclusivly to Microsoft solutions, if they wanted to use sendmail, would just set themselves up a UNIXy box of some sort.
But, you're right...if they do set up sendmail on their NT box, that's still a Good Thing(tm), because it means that normal mail programs (including those that run on non-Microsoft operating systems) can be used on the clients.
--
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
Well, turn it around. The real question is: if you've been told that your server has to be NT, wouldn't you prefer to be running sendmail than IIS?
The sad truth, as some of us are all too aware, is that technical considerations don't always guide the purchasing decisions. There's still a big high-level push to use Microsoft products in many places. Being able to use sendmail, with all the support and testing that it's gone through, very likely makes an NT mailserver that much more stable.
Well, don't forget that you'll have to carry all of that to Mt. St. Helens, as it's the nearest convenient volcano.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I see this as Sendmail, Inc. realizing that their market on Unix systems is starting to evaporate. These days, many admins are realizing that there are much better alternatives to sendmail (like exim, postfix, qmail), and happily, most of these are under good, open source licenses.
Sendmail needs to get their act together and remove years of cruft, or they'll soon find themselves welcome only on WinNT.
--
Ian Peters
It's easy for the Unix advocate to wonder why the hell open source projects are porting to NT. I've often asked myself this question and I've come up with one answer: To get them to quit using NT.
Sendmail is a perfect example. Once an IS manager uses sendmail and discovers just how versatile and superior it is over Microsoft's product, they'll be ecstatic- especially since the cost of ownership is probably a ridiculous difference.
But after a while, the IS guy is going to notice that inherent problems with NT itself are really bothering him. Since he doesn't have Microsoft products keeping him bound to NT, he can then move to a much-more-stable platform like Linux and stick with what he knows: Sendmail.
The great thing about this is that the Microsoft fans probably think open source projects porting to NT is some kind of validation of NT as a viable computing platform. Heh heh.
*ROTFLMAO*
This could well be a blow to Linux's increasing popularity as it addresses some fundamental concerns about NT.
No, It's a blow to NT - it will forstall the potential deployment of a bastardized, not-quite-standard Microsoft imitation of sendmail. It will also drive home the point to many a PHB that you can get sendmail on NT, but not for free. On Linux it's free. Contrary to popular belief, such things do matter to PHB's. [
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Why is it good for NT? Because it allows for the migration of people used to using Sendmail on Linux. When there's yet another security breach on the system, they'll start looking more seriously at moving to NT, since the services they're running would be the same. NT5 would be a justifiable expense, while Linux would continue to prove the adage "You get what you pay for."
:-)
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
http://www.perform ancecomputing.com/reviews/software/9904c.shtml
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
Whatever the case, though, Allman and his friends at Sendmail, Inc. are doing exactly what companies who use the open source model should be doing: they're adding some real value, not just repackaging it. Besides, after all the hard work he's done on Sendmail, I'd say he deserves to make a buck on it.
You don't seem to know what Public Folders are about. Public Folders are kind of like usenet, in that it is a distributed database of replicas. If you introduce a new message into one replica, the servers will replicate that message to other replicas. The major feature that Exchange Public Folders has over usenet and other systems is that you can create replicas based on topology and clients will automatically be directed to the replica closest to them. They don't need to know or care which server has the replica.
Oh, and Exchange integrates Public Folders with its support of NNTP, so that you can access Public Folders via NNTP as well as with an Outlook client.
Argh... I was working on an order desk server this summer at my job. We originally started off running IIS on... get this.... a P120. Yes, that's for a dynamic realtime ordering and electronic delivery server. AUGH!It was terrible. After performance issues and delivery problems, we eventually installed win 95 and Apache. (No, I was under orders. Augh. It was gross.) From there, I finally got it over to an unix box. One of my biggest complaints was that win32 sendmail, in it's various implementations was one of two things. a) Faulty or b)expensive. One option we tried was both. It was funny... after working for months trying to get everything to work seamlessly on windows, we gave up and brought one of those old HP-UX boxes out of retirement... and we were in full operation in 6 hours. Yes, *6.* I was kicking myself. I got three days off.
You'll eat it and you'll like it.
Because you already have a slew of NT machines, and everyone in IT is trained in how to use them. You can migrate to Linux, but that costs lots of time and money. Even though Linux itself is free, it requires a real investment to get people trained on it.
That is, truly abysmal.
We were setting up an NT laptop to demo against a Samba box last week, and I got so frustrated just watching my boss (who actually works with NT) (my job title is Linux Specialist, I don't have to ever even boot Windows unless StarOffice can't handle the attachment) beat his head against that operating system, I finally told him straight out, "Don't ever make me program on NT. I'll quit."
I should think this is actually less a migration tool from *nix to NT and more in the other (better) direction. After all, replace Exchange with Sendmail, IIS with Apache, Office with StarOffice, and you may as well replace what's underneath it with something lighter, faster, and stronger...
As for sendmail being full of holes, it was my understanding that most things post-8.8 were pretty well fixed, with the usual turnaround time (sub-24 hours) on anything new...
I still think it's odd that CNN would have an article about sendmail.
Umm.. that's because it's a reprinted article from LinuxWorld. CNN reprints a lot of stuff that comes from IDG magazines..
It's not really odd; they've been advertising their closed-source Sendmail Pro thing for some time here on Slashdot.
Of course, the only reason anyone would need Sendmail Pro is because of the sheer user hostility of sendmail.cf and friends. Keep that bat book handy.
I've switched all my machines over to Exim. Nice configuration files, and licensed under the GPL.
I think the real question this article raises is...if you're setting up a mail server, and you've chosen sendmail as your MTA, why in the heck would you want to run it on NT?
--
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
I'd just like to draw attention to one problem with the current moderation forms. In flat mode, you select a moderation action from the list (+1/-1, comment) then you scroll down to read the next article. Unfortunately, the text focus stays in the selection list (BAD DESIGN, netscape). You hit an arrow key, the screen doesn't move, so instead you use the mouse or whatever. In the meantime, you just changed your moderation selection - it's way off screen, so you don't notice it until you hit the "moderation" button at the bottom of the screen. Then you see this nice little list of moderation actions you did, some of which you never intended, with no way to undo it. ****There has to be an "undo-moderation" button****. This is a very frustrating user-interface issue.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
<Obligatory NT whipping>
Why should Exchange users be the only ones to enjoy the pretty blue user interface? Now even Sendmail admins can benefit from revolutionary new error messages!
The BSOD was the only thing missing from Unix sendmail. Well, that and a Navajo code talker to translate the .cf files.
You have new mail. You will have to restart your computer for this change to take effect.
</Obligatory NT whipping>
Sendmail and Exchange can't really be compared directly as they fulfill different needs. Sendmail is a MTA, Exchange is much more. The functions that sendmail provide are covered by one section of exchange. It's the Internet mail server (or connector) and not the Exchange MTA that's the parallel for those that are curious)
IMO, as an MTA, Sendmail wins hands down, for several reasons, being better at anti-spam, and general potential configurabiliy. Exchange however, would win on ease of configurability. (I'm not including sendmail pro, which I have no experience of, just sendmail via M4 and the cf file.)
Interestingly, this is almost typical of my experiences of MS vs opensource projects, the MS one is easier to configure, even if the OSS is more powerful overall.
Back to the topic, I've used and configured Sendmail, (right down to the cf file level when it wasn't doing stuff correctly). I've used exchange from 4.0 to 5.5. Both seem to be fine for thier respective purposes, albeit with a little work on both sides.
--
Exigo spamos et dona ferentes
part, and one that other vendors might do well
to mimic.
First, from an "ethical" perspective: NT is a
closed-source proprietary operating system. The
expectation that you'll get quality open-source
apps on NT is and should be unrealistic. It is
easier to create open-source software in an open
environment, and that's exactly what Linux and
BSD provides.
Moreover, because of the closed nature of NT, it
is more of an investment to get software working
"natively" on NT than under Linux (where almost
any task you'd want to do has been done and a
high-quality example has been published). Sendmail
is just "protecting their investment", an action
necessitated by Microsoft's strategy of using
closed proprietary APIs. Another reason for IT
people NOT to lock themselves into Microsoft's
proprietary solutions.
Now, from a business perspective: Win32 is where
the money is right now. If Sendmail can pick up
good revenue from selling their product closed
under NT, they'll have less incentive to keep
their extensions closed under Linux. This may
be the best of both worlds --- they can keep the
goodwill of the Linux community by distributing
open software there, but make money by charging
people to use it under NT.
It seems like an interesting alternative open-
source business model to me. Why haven't more
people discussed this as a way of making money
off open source development?
I think lately people have begun to realize that Perl and Sendmail and co are superior to their counterparts on NT so instead of learning Unix/Linux and actually getting the "real" thing they ask for an NT version. IMO this doesn't fix the problem it simply maskes it. You will still have all the problems you normally have with an NT mailer. Just because it's sendmail it doesn't mean that it will magically fix everything that's wrong with NT.
Vidi, vici, veni. (I saw, I conquered, I came)
If sendmail adds security, exactly how bad is Exchange Server??
For a start, it's not a Sendmail story; it's an NT story. More specifically, it's a Unix Flagship App being Made Available for NT story. For me, the relevant paragraph cites Sendmail as making NT "more scaleable and more secure". This is a big thing (as we all know), and a factor that may weigh heavily in the minds of NT admins considering migration.
Which means there'll probably be a slew of 'traitor', 'sell-out', etc aimed at Sendmail, all of which cheerfully ignore the reality of business; companies are around to make money and the best way of doing that is to have your software work on as many machines as possible.
This could well be a blow to Linux's increasing popularity as it addresses some fundamental concerns about NT. But that's no reason to blame Sendmail.
For me, the great benefit of Sendmail on NT (and while is this strictly speaking from experience with the MetaInfo owned version, after trying out 3.0 at Networld it appears to be just as valid) was twofold:
1) it just works. period. At a previous job, we had to use NT because of a state project, and I didn't want to have exchange doing direct mail transfers. So, we got SendMail/NT, and it works like a champ. As a gateway, it's unbeatable.
The new version is even nicer, and it fixes a lot of the inabilities of 2.5 to customize setups.
Frankly, I don't understand the person who talked about its instability- ours was on a pII/350 (256 megs ram, 8 gigs hd) that was running IIS and Proxy 2, and that was a box that never hiccuped*. At last check, there were over 4 gigs of mail sent and 11 gigs of mail received on that box, with but 2 messages hiccuping. It doesn't interfere with other services, and it starts and stops quickly.
Now, I don't really know about its robustness for POP purposes. We didn't use it that way. The only account was mine for mail list reading. I have heard that the new version makes performance quite effective, as the previous one did apparently suffer with more than 500 pop accounts.
2) It finances sendmail's continued existence. When they bought out MetaInfo's product, Sendmail Inc. raised prices and removed the unlimited POP option, causing some grumbling. Before, it cost $250 for schools, with unlimited users. Still, for nonprofits, it's still a bargain (if you have to use NT), and the effective cost per user is less than exchange's.
*The big problem with NT is the myriad ways that it can screw up. But at root I think is people who think that making a production NT server requires less planning than a *nix box.
I wouldn't dream of taking a by-the-server-wizard installation of Redhat directly to use, and similarly, it's foolish to expect the same of NT in spite of Microsoft's portrayal. Plus, the other things that get added (like HP's print tools) can complicate matters unnecessarily.
Nor would I put it in use with testing it, and then rebuilding it from scratch, if it was my first such setup.
stored on computers from birth to the grave
I've deployed quite a few NT servers, but these days, I'm finding unix boxen more and more appealing. Unlike most people who gripe about the stability of NT, this isn't my issue. I have NT servers that have been running for well over a year without a hitch. My newfound preference for unix is due to flexibility. Configuring NT services is nowhere near as flexible as configuring comparable unix services, not without getting into some real code anyhow.
It's interesting how they point out the easy to use UI for configuring sendmail on NT. Although the primary reason I like unix is due to the power available by modifying configuration files to taste, I still think there should be two levels of configuration for any particular service.
Even if the second level is just a "browser" to give you an overview of the current setup, it would be a welcome addition. Sometimes its aggrevating to scroll through huge config files just to find one particular setting. I wouldn't give up the slightest bit of flexibility for it, but it would be nice.
I personally consider the port of sendmail a good thing. Exchange has some nice features, but it's a serious dog. And I've had the unfortunate experience of developing exchange/outlook commercial plug-ins on both the client and server side. It wasn't as bad as notes/vim, but it was close.