By the way Adam is actually a pretty good reviewer. He did another show before X-Play, I think. Or maybe it was a review on another form of media. At any rate, he isn't the spazzed-out douchebag they make him seem like these days. They do him (and gamers, really) a disservice by putting him in the position he's in acting like a baffoon.
Oh man. I totally forgot Judgement Day. It's basically x-play without the wit or any hot chick.
That tommy guy is apparently a videogame music composer or something, though. He seems like a fairly tight guy, but I don't know why they need yet another game review show. There's some "G4.com" or whatever in the mornings with that hot blonde punky chick and some guy and a girl and they review games on there, too. It's nuts. Enough game reviews!
I wish they had more stuff that didn't have to do with games. Attack of the Show is about the only thing (other than their block of anime and infomercials) that isn't all about videogames.
I don't expect them to be 24x7 hardcore geek or anything. But come on. Give me something other than "help my mom clean her mouse balls" and "ooh hot naked asian chicks on the hood of an import drift car!" and "oh more videogames".
Fighting remote control things on wheels lost all of its steam after about two years.
I hate when the american version with those two ESPN-ish douchebags comes on. I hate when the tired old version with the guy from Red Dwarf comes on. I hate when the one with Dweezle Zappa comes on.
Please.. no more battling remote control things on TV. If you come up with a show that has autonomous ROBOTS battling, I'm all for it.
In the meantime, Master Blasters on Sci-Fi kicks fucking ass. Now that's what I'm talking about. Rockets. Explosions. Speed. Crazy white guys blowing their hands off all in the name of fiery glorious death. Hell fucking yes.
In fact, I see things on Slashdot a day or two after they've been on Attack of the Show *FAR* more often than the other way around. And when Attack of the Show takes something from Slashdot, they actually attribute it.
Anyway, who cars - the web and television both survive by butt-raping each other's content on a daily basis.
What do you expect Leo to be?! He's a fucking television host/radio host who explains tech to average people. A lot of people at Slashdot have careers a lot like that, you know? Just because you're helping people figure their shit out instead of writing the next BitTorrent client or 200-mile wifi cantenna doesn't mean you're a n00b.
And yes, aside form his commentary, his "instructional" information could be learned from a book. You know what book? Probably the book HE WROTE. He writes an extremely popular technical almanac every year and has for quite a few years now. It's not bad. I wouldn't buy it, but if I had a tech-interested family member who was somewhat short on the actual tech experience or knowledge, I'd completely refer them to it.
Leo is a communicator. He's calm and polite and interesting and has a very smooth and helpful way of explaining things that would otherwise be very difficult for non-tech people to understand. He performs an important job in the tech industry - helping people. Some of us could learn a thing or two. If you want to draw in more customers and a larger tech community, you have to start somewhere. You're not going to get it by insulting people and turning them away if they aren't as incredibly 31337 as you and I. you're going to do it by empowering them. Help them through problems. Explain things to them. Maybe expose them to some stuff they weren't familiar with before. I gaurantee the first time a lot of people will hear about what P2P really is or wifi or the RIAA or Windows Update are through that guy.
He isn't going to tell you how to write your own software and port it to the iPod. He's going to tell you how to get your ipod to synch with your mac properly. He's not going to tell you how to create and post a bit torrent... but he'll tell you what bit torrent is and point you to some clients and some information about it.
There are a lot of hack "tech support genius" guys on the radio. They all suck and stay the stupidest shit. Laporte actually knows his stuff. You should listen to his show on KFI on the weekend some time. Or his podcast. Or watch him on TV. Or read one of his books.
You forget that most of the world are geek-wanabees
Oh yeah. Totally. All the really cool people that I know try to emulate geeks. They just totally envy us and want to be just like us. You bet...:P
Hell, I'm a wannabe porn-star, but they said they couldn't find any chicks willing to risk the pummeling by my freak-of-nature gargantuan cock. Not even the really lose "mature" ladies that do horses and stuff at the end of their career to keep the money coming in for their cocaine habit.
Call for Help had some good interviews. And they had some good segments (usually involving Kevin Rose and some hack or Yoshi and some mod). And yes, it was very n00b oriented. That's the point. It was a show your dad or grandma could watch and learn something from.
Attack of the Show is more like a cross between Slashdot and Fark, but clean enough for television.
Most of the content from G4/TechTV is just awful. It's too MTV-ish geared for zit-faced basement dwelling pre-pubescent kids who'll never get a date. You know, the kind of people that would think some stereotypical black guy with cornrows, bling and a funky nickname interviewing half naked asian pornstars in between showing "drift" races is "really awesome". TechTV wasn't like that. G4 has become that. Of course, G4 is owned by Viacom, which owns MTV - I believe. TechTV was owned by Paul Allen.
Most people who watch G4/TechTV don't do it because it's the best thing in the world. They watch it because it's all there is. What other tech shows are you going to watch on TV? You're not - there aren't any, unless you count a re-run of Monster Garage or a rare episode of Alan Alda hosting Nova (which is probably about my favorite non-fiction series ever on television).
Actually - I wouldn't even qualify Attack of the Show that way. That show actually is good. But everything else on the station is mediocre. Well, except for those cool 'documentary' shows about the history of gaming. That shit is pretty cool.
What I'd really like is to see some sort of a channel dedicated to learning. And then maybe a channel dedicated to science. Unfortunately, the two stations that used to be that are now "The Ladies Channel" that show nothing but "A Wedding Story" and "A Baby Story" and "A Makeover Story" and "A Dating Story" (I'm not shitting you - that's the lineup on The Learning Channel!)... and then Discovery.. I don't even know what that has these days. Probably just a bunch of send-person-out-of-town, redo-house, surprise-person shows.
Cheats! is an awful show. Aside from it being just a dumb idea, the host is awful. Some gimpy looking ostrich-like chick who clearly knows dick about gaming telling a bunch of people how to beat a crappy console game with her oh-so-witty scripted remarks?
Filter is just as retarded. Another weird looking chick (they're trying to push the hot-chick thing for the male viewers, but aside from the punky blonde, morgan webb and sarah lane, they're all kind of below-average). And she basically presents what's nothing more than a weekly slashdot-poll/meme.
Then the stupid Arena show. A bunch of total dorksj playing games with commentary on TV. And it's so boring. *yawn*. And the host is some blockhead douchebag who probably hasn't played a game in his life and who doesn't get most of the jokes Kevin Perera throws out.
Then there's X-Play, which is okay - Adam is a smart guy even if they make him act like a spaz on the show. And Morgan... smart chick and I'd watch her read the phone book for all it matters.
Kevin Pererra is pretty funny. Kevin Rose was a good balance to him, though. I miss Rose because he added some authenticity and credibility to the show. And a little edge. He was the linux, OSS, screw the RIAA guy. Probably the best thing G4/TechTV has ever had.
Laporte and Patrick are both cool guys. Laporte explains thing so well. I actually like listening to his radio show, because while he talks about mundane windows-oriented stuff that my dog could figure out, I still learn a little bit about how to deal with explaining tech to people and after all these years, that still benefits me in my career. He has a knack for that.
Their race car/naked-whore shows are boring and retarded. If I cared about drifting or car racing, I'd fucking watch ESPN.
Mostly, I just hate all the god damned reruns. I swear to god they play X-Play 12 times per day.. and half the episodes are about games that have been out for two or three years!
Sarah Lane is pretty cool, too. I guess I just think that because I've been watching for a long time and she kind of grows on you. Plus, she's kind of hot in a petite little... nevermind, Kevin Rose might be reading this....
Brendan Moran is... well... Clealry not too tech oriented. But he's a lush. Drunks are cool.
I miss Jessika. The hot little redhead. I miss Patrick. I hoe Leo brings him back on. And Martin Sargeant and (Lauren? - his cohost) were decent. Sometimes his show sucked, but I'd rather watch that than yet another god damned rerun.
And this Cinematech thing... a half hour stretch of fucking videogame vidcaps? LAME!
Their historical stuff is really cool though. Like when they do a whole half hour or hour about the guy who invented the gameboy or Nolan Bushnell or something. Aside from Attack of the Show, that's probably the best thing they do.
You know what I wish? I wish Sean Baby was going to be the new host of Attack of the Show. I swear to god I've always hated that fucking asshole douchebag, but after watching him on the show for about two weeks, I completely changed my opinion of him. He's funny, smart and kind of charming. I don't wanna give the guy a rimjob or anything, but he was just obnoxious enough and smart enough to be fun to watch.
I guess he has his own animated show or something coming on G4 soon, though.
I'm sorry, but I've dealt with far too many email admins who didn't have a clue and were responsible for an entire enterprise structure that could barely manage simple tasks, much less figure out a complex mish-mash of OSS solutions. It isn't that they're deficient, but you have to plan a deployment for the level of administration that is going to be afforded to it. Someone who is posting to Slashdot of all places - to get a review of their deployment plan - is (and no offense to the submitter) probably not more than an armchair email admin. He doesn't really say what his email-related expertise is, so I have to assume it's "average" or below. And if not him, then at some point they will be hiring an admin to do his work for him after the deployment (or if he's laid off or run over by a bus - whatever).
His deployment plan is complex when compared with most commercial solutions and because he'll be the sole point of support and maintenance, when he moves on the next guy who takes over will have to have all of his knowledge and skills and understanding of this deployment. It has the potential to become a mess.
I think you will find that at least half of "email admins" don't even know how to telnet to 110 or 143 or 25 and run a manual session. In fact, based on my experience, I would wager that far more than half don't know how to do that.
So I'm certainly not going to suggest mishmashes of OSS software without professional support to such people. And I've learned not to assume that everyone is a genius. And not everyone, certainly, is a professional mail server admin. It sounds to me like this is sort of a project he was thrown at and he is picking it up as he goes along. (For the record, I'm not a professional mail server admin either - that isn't where my focus lays - but I have dealt with enough of them to see the pitfalls they've encountered with commercial and OSS products).
So, what I really want to know is this:
He's clearly not a professional experienced admin of mailservers. This may be his first bit foray into a full deployment in a production environment. He has four or five major components. When postfix goes tits-up or he encounters some sort of trippy IMAP flag behavior or corrupted mailboxes that he can't manage to fix... and thousands or tens of thousands (if this company is growing) of users are without service and they're all losing business due to the downtime... Who is he going to go to? What if he's on vacation and the webserver guy is stuck having to figure out what's wrong with the mailserver and he doesn't have a clue?
I'd take talking to someone within minutes over having to post to some forum or IRC channel and hoping I get something useful from a bunch of people who are not obligated to help in any way. In a non-corporate environment, that'd be a different issue. I can take the time to get help or learn what's going on and debug the situation.
As I said, the OSS deployment is for a personal project. I run a huge website and it sends out thousands of emails per day (notices, registrations, password reminders, etc) and recieves several times that (75% of which is spam).
Since there are only a handful of users, POP is just fine. Or in my case, just ssh-ing in and firing up mutt on the server.
If I were offering an email service to people, I'd spend more time on one of the five zillion webmail "solutions" out there or with IMAP. Of course, that'd still depend on how much performance I wanted to sacrifice on the system just for people to use IMAP and webmail.
I definitely didn't want IMAP and webmail for my own use enough to keep playing with all the IMAP servers out there (and webmail setups). I found an IMAP client I liked once and a webmail client I also liked. But one used maildir and the other used mbox. So at that point, I just said "fuck it" and realized that I was wasting far too much time on an email solution for a single person when pop and mutt would both do.:)
I haven't found much use for it in games. Maybe a little in Counter Strike.
It just depresses me that the internet is turning into one big version of those phone chat lines they advertise at 3am on local/cable stations for total losers who have nothing better to do on a Friday or saturday night than call some "chat line" to talk to other fugly desperate and boring people for $3.99/minute.
When it comes down to it, that's mostly what livejournal, meetup, makoutclub and all these things are turning into. With some exceptions, most blogs are nothing than a flag waving "look out neat I am don't you want to get to know me?!" exercise to hook up.
It's sad. It's gross. It's pathetic.
Hook up at the clubs. Play games and learn stuff on the internet.
I support email servers for a living. I have for almost seven years - exclusively on Solaris, AIX and NT (though I do so on linux for my personal use).
While I think that your deployment is a reasonably sane one - as far as going the OSS/free route is concerned - I agree with the other poster here who said that having nobody to blame will be an issue in the future. When your job is on the line, it's good to have someone else who is supposed to know and fix everything for you when you are hard-up for solutions. Email administrators for the largest and biggest corporations in the world don't do it all in-house. Even they contract out for support for their enterprise level products. Because their customers and bosses expect great reliability and performance and features and they don't want to wait for several days (or longer) while you read some half-assed documentation on a website, chat up some gurus in IRC and post to some web forums and usenet groups hoping for help.
Also, there is nobody certifying that the products you are using will absolutely work together. And on whatever platform you're using. They may say they've tried it on it - but I doubt in many cases they will say it's been certified through a thorough internal QA process that weeds out a lot of bugs and such.
Also, when you really must have something fixed, you will either have to write the code yourself (laborious to do, without even talking about testing and implementing). If you have a commercial product and a contract, you can present a business case to get your issue some priority and have a fix. And you can always threaten to drop the product if they don't do what you want (it works more often than you'd think).
Even when full-fledged, thorough, all-encompassing high-capacity commercial servers - the position of email admin is a full time job for at least one or more people. Using a dozen different open source products and maintaining everything and keeping a constant sandbox environment to work in (you don't want to introduce upgrades or patches or changes on production, of course!) will consume all of your available time. If you are the full-time email admin here and that is your only responsibility - have at it. But if you have other responsibilities... I think the commercial path might be better for you.
Again - I'm an OSS advocate. Yet, I feel strongly that there are some cases in which commercial software and support is valuable. Depending on the specifics of your duties and position, this may or may not apply to you. But consider it. Especially if you're going to be fairly huge some day.
Another solution would be to contract with a third party. There are companies that do nothing but provide you with email solutions. They can do this based on very strong commercial products. These companies themselves will host and run the hardware for you. They will do all of the configuration and deployment and maintenance and administration for you. I'm not familiar with their prices, though - but do look into it. The upgrades and crashes and migrations are their responsibility. Meeting QOS is their responsibility. They will deal with the commercial mailserver vendor(s) for you. They already have support contracts with them. All you do is tell them how big of a deployment you want and you're set.
After working with commercial mailservers for several years, I was ready to setup a deployment of my own for my own personal project. Not having any funds, I decided I was going to go the OSS rout. Just figuring out what would work together and what wouldn't (you have to make sure your POP, IMAP and webmail servers all use the same mailbox formats. You have a gazillion options for accounting from LDAP to MySQL, countless authentication mechanisms, etc). It drove me nuts. It was at that point that I started to see the light and the real value in what I did with commercial products. Having an entire server that supports everything you could possibly need or want in an email solution through one install and one configur
I would rather chat on AIM than via voice. I would rather get an email than discuss it via VoIP. I would rather play a game and type to people than chat with them in-game (ruins the flow and feel of the game's mood). And I certainly don't want to get in huge online "chat" communities via voice.
Stop treating the internet like a fucking night club or highschools you stupid fucks. Jesus fucking christ. ENOUGH ALREADY.
We are the only country (or maybe one of two) that does mass circumcision. However, we do not have the highest longevity rate. So I don't know that it necessary justifies anything.
And this isn't 800AD. I'm pretty sure even if I were not circumcised, I could keep that fucker clean. You know - soap. Running water. Talc.
When was the last time parents had the doctor take out the kids' tonsils and appendix just after birth based on "we don't need it"?
I don't really care either way. I just think it's amusing that if we did something like this to females, we'd be considered a female genital mutilation nation. But since it's boys - it's all good.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh. You mixed Steve Balmer and Paul Allen together. :)
PS: Paul Allen owns the Portland TrailBlazers, too.
I wish I had mod points!
By the way Adam is actually a pretty good reviewer. He did another show before X-Play, I think. Or maybe it was a review on another form of media. At any rate, he isn't the spazzed-out douchebag they make him seem like these days. They do him (and gamers, really) a disservice by putting him in the position he's in acting like a baffoon.
Oh man. I totally forgot Judgement Day. It's basically x-play without the wit or any hot chick.
That tommy guy is apparently a videogame music composer or something, though. He seems like a fairly tight guy, but I don't know why they need yet another game review show. There's some "G4.com" or whatever in the mornings with that hot blonde punky chick and some guy and a girl and they review games on there, too. It's nuts. Enough game reviews!
I wish they had more stuff that didn't have to do with games. Attack of the Show is about the only thing (other than their block of anime and infomercials) that isn't all about videogames.
I don't expect them to be 24x7 hardcore geek or anything. But come on. Give me something other than "help my mom clean her mouse balls" and "ooh hot naked asian chicks on the hood of an import drift car!" and "oh more videogames".
If you're like me, you have friends
I fail it.
Teh Sexay
You're kidding, right?
Fighting remote control things on wheels lost all of its steam after about two years.
I hate when the american version with those two ESPN-ish douchebags comes on. I hate when the tired old version with the guy from Red Dwarf comes on. I hate when the one with Dweezle Zappa comes on.
Please.. no more battling remote control things on TV. If you come up with a show that has autonomous ROBOTS battling, I'm all for it.
In the meantime, Master Blasters on Sci-Fi kicks fucking ass. Now that's what I'm talking about. Rockets. Explosions. Speed. Crazy white guys blowing their hands off all in the name of fiery glorious death. Hell fucking yes.
Yet you don't mind Ask Slashdot?
I overhear someone saying something flat out wrong about computers, simply because they don't know better.
Yeah, managers suck!
I don't buy that for a minute.
In fact, I see things on Slashdot a day or two after they've been on Attack of the Show *FAR* more often than the other way around. And when Attack of the Show takes something from Slashdot, they actually attribute it.
Anyway, who cars - the web and television both survive by butt-raping each other's content on a daily basis.
Someone is going to rip me a new asshole on the "lose/loose" tip.
What do you expect Leo to be?! He's a fucking television host/radio host who explains tech to average people. A lot of people at Slashdot have careers a lot like that, you know? Just because you're helping people figure their shit out instead of writing the next BitTorrent client or 200-mile wifi cantenna doesn't mean you're a n00b.
And yes, aside form his commentary, his "instructional" information could be learned from a book. You know what book? Probably the book HE WROTE. He writes an extremely popular technical almanac every year and has for quite a few years now. It's not bad. I wouldn't buy it, but if I had a tech-interested family member who was somewhat short on the actual tech experience or knowledge, I'd completely refer them to it.
Leo is a communicator. He's calm and polite and interesting and has a very smooth and helpful way of explaining things that would otherwise be very difficult for non-tech people to understand. He performs an important job in the tech industry - helping people. Some of us could learn a thing or two. If you want to draw in more customers and a larger tech community, you have to start somewhere. You're not going to get it by insulting people and turning them away if they aren't as incredibly 31337 as you and I. you're going to do it by empowering them. Help them through problems. Explain things to them. Maybe expose them to some stuff they weren't familiar with before. I gaurantee the first time a lot of people will hear about what P2P really is or wifi or the RIAA or Windows Update are through that guy.
He isn't going to tell you how to write your own software and port it to the iPod. He's going to tell you how to get your ipod to synch with your mac properly. He's not going to tell you how to create and post a bit torrent... but he'll tell you what bit torrent is and point you to some clients and some information about it.
There are a lot of hack "tech support genius" guys on the radio. They all suck and stay the stupidest shit. Laporte actually knows his stuff. You should listen to his show on KFI on the weekend some time. Or his podcast. Or watch him on TV. Or read one of his books.
You forget that most of the world are geek-wanabees
:P
Oh yeah. Totally. All the really cool people that I know try to emulate geeks. They just totally envy us and want to be just like us. You bet...
Hell, I'm a wannabe porn-star, but they said they couldn't find any chicks willing to risk the pummeling by my freak-of-nature gargantuan cock. Not even the really lose "mature" ladies that do horses and stuff at the end of their career to keep the money coming in for their cocaine habit.
Call for Help had some good interviews. And they had some good segments (usually involving Kevin Rose and some hack or Yoshi and some mod). And yes, it was very n00b oriented. That's the point. It was a show your dad or grandma could watch and learn something from.
Attack of the Show is more like a cross between Slashdot and Fark, but clean enough for television.
Most of the content from G4/TechTV is just awful. It's too MTV-ish geared for zit-faced basement dwelling pre-pubescent kids who'll never get a date. You know, the kind of people that would think some stereotypical black guy with cornrows, bling and a funky nickname interviewing half naked asian pornstars in between showing "drift" races is "really awesome". TechTV wasn't like that. G4 has become that. Of course, G4 is owned by Viacom, which owns MTV - I believe. TechTV was owned by Paul Allen.
Most people who watch G4/TechTV don't do it because it's the best thing in the world. They watch it because it's all there is. What other tech shows are you going to watch on TV? You're not - there aren't any, unless you count a re-run of Monster Garage or a rare episode of Alan Alda hosting Nova (which is probably about my favorite non-fiction series ever on television).
Actually - I wouldn't even qualify Attack of the Show that way. That show actually is good. But everything else on the station is mediocre. Well, except for those cool 'documentary' shows about the history of gaming. That shit is pretty cool.
What I'd really like is to see some sort of a channel dedicated to learning. And then maybe a channel dedicated to science. Unfortunately, the two stations that used to be that are now "The Ladies Channel" that show nothing but "A Wedding Story" and "A Baby Story" and "A Makeover Story" and "A Dating Story" (I'm not shitting you - that's the lineup on The Learning Channel!)... and then Discovery.. I don't even know what that has these days. Probably just a bunch of send-person-out-of-town, redo-house, surprise-person shows.
Cheats! is an awful show. Aside from it being just a dumb idea, the host is awful. Some gimpy looking ostrich-like chick who clearly knows dick about gaming telling a bunch of people how to beat a crappy console game with her oh-so-witty scripted remarks?
Filter is just as retarded. Another weird looking chick (they're trying to push the hot-chick thing for the male viewers, but aside from the punky blonde, morgan webb and sarah lane, they're all kind of below-average). And she basically presents what's nothing more than a weekly slashdot-poll/meme.
Then the stupid Arena show. A bunch of total dorksj playing games with commentary on TV. And it's so boring. *yawn*. And the host is some blockhead douchebag who probably hasn't played a game in his life and who doesn't get most of the jokes Kevin Perera throws out.
Then there's X-Play, which is okay - Adam is a smart guy even if they make him act like a spaz on the show. And Morgan... smart chick and I'd watch her read the phone book for all it matters.
Kevin Pererra is pretty funny. Kevin Rose was a good balance to him, though. I miss Rose because he added some authenticity and credibility to the show. And a little edge. He was the linux, OSS, screw the RIAA guy. Probably the best thing G4/TechTV has ever had.
Laporte and Patrick are both cool guys. Laporte explains thing so well. I actually like listening to his radio show, because while he talks about mundane windows-oriented stuff that my dog could figure out, I still learn a little bit about how to deal with explaining tech to people and after all these years, that still benefits me in my career. He has a knack for that.
Their race car/naked-whore shows are boring and retarded. If I cared about drifting or car racing, I'd fucking watch ESPN.
Mostly, I just hate all the god damned reruns. I swear to god they play X-Play 12 times per day.. and half the episodes are about games that have been out for two or three years!
Sarah Lane is pretty cool, too. I guess I just think that because I've been watching for a long time and she kind of grows on you. Plus, she's kind of hot in a petite little... nevermind, Kevin Rose might be reading this....
Brendan Moran is... well... Clealry not too tech oriented. But he's a lush. Drunks are cool.
I miss Jessika. The hot little redhead. I miss Patrick. I hoe Leo brings him back on. And Martin Sargeant and (Lauren? - his cohost) were decent. Sometimes his show sucked, but I'd rather watch that than yet another god damned rerun.
And this Cinematech thing... a half hour stretch of fucking videogame vidcaps? LAME!
Their historical stuff is really cool though. Like when they do a whole half hour or hour about the guy who invented the gameboy or Nolan Bushnell or something. Aside from Attack of the Show, that's probably the best thing they do.
You know what I wish? I wish Sean Baby was going to be the new host of Attack of the Show. I swear to god I've always hated that fucking asshole douchebag, but after watching him on the show for about two weeks, I completely changed my opinion of him. He's funny, smart and kind of charming. I don't wanna give the guy a rimjob or anything, but he was just obnoxious enough and smart enough to be fun to watch.
I guess he has his own animated show or something coming on G4 soon, though.
I'm sorry, but I've dealt with far too many email admins who didn't have a clue and were responsible for an entire enterprise structure that could barely manage simple tasks, much less figure out a complex mish-mash of OSS solutions. It isn't that they're deficient, but you have to plan a deployment for the level of administration that is going to be afforded to it. Someone who is posting to Slashdot of all places - to get a review of their deployment plan - is (and no offense to the submitter) probably not more than an armchair email admin. He doesn't really say what his email-related expertise is, so I have to assume it's "average" or below. And if not him, then at some point they will be hiring an admin to do his work for him after the deployment (or if he's laid off or run over by a bus - whatever).
His deployment plan is complex when compared with most commercial solutions and because he'll be the sole point of support and maintenance, when he moves on the next guy who takes over will have to have all of his knowledge and skills and understanding of this deployment. It has the potential to become a mess.
I think you will find that at least half of "email admins" don't even know how to telnet to 110 or 143 or 25 and run a manual session. In fact, based on my experience, I would wager that far more than half don't know how to do that.
So I'm certainly not going to suggest mishmashes of OSS software without professional support to such people. And I've learned not to assume that everyone is a genius. And not everyone, certainly, is a professional mail server admin. It sounds to me like this is sort of a project he was thrown at and he is picking it up as he goes along. (For the record, I'm not a professional mail server admin either - that isn't where my focus lays - but I have dealt with enough of them to see the pitfalls they've encountered with commercial and OSS products).
So, what I really want to know is this:
He's clearly not a professional experienced admin of mailservers. This may be his first bit foray into a full deployment in a production environment. He has four or five major components. When postfix goes tits-up or he encounters some sort of trippy IMAP flag behavior or corrupted mailboxes that he can't manage to fix... and thousands or tens of thousands (if this company is growing) of users are without service and they're all losing business due to the downtime... Who is he going to go to? What if he's on vacation and the webserver guy is stuck having to figure out what's wrong with the mailserver and he doesn't have a clue?
I'd take talking to someone within minutes over having to post to some forum or IRC channel and hoping I get something useful from a bunch of people who are not obligated to help in any way. In a non-corporate environment, that'd be a different issue. I can take the time to get help or learn what's going on and debug the situation.
As I said, the OSS deployment is for a personal project. I run a huge website and it sends out thousands of emails per day (notices, registrations, password reminders, etc) and recieves several times that (75% of which is spam).
:)
Since there are only a handful of users, POP is just fine. Or in my case, just ssh-ing in and firing up mutt on the server.
If I were offering an email service to people, I'd spend more time on one of the five zillion webmail "solutions" out there or with IMAP. Of course, that'd still depend on how much performance I wanted to sacrifice on the system just for people to use IMAP and webmail.
I definitely didn't want IMAP and webmail for my own use enough to keep playing with all the IMAP servers out there (and webmail setups). I found an IMAP client I liked once and a webmail client I also liked. But one used maildir and the other used mbox. So at that point, I just said "fuck it" and realized that I was wasting far too much time on an email solution for a single person when pop and mutt would both do.
I haven't found much use for it in games. Maybe a little in Counter Strike.
It just depresses me that the internet is turning into one big version of those phone chat lines they advertise at 3am on local/cable stations for total losers who have nothing better to do on a Friday or saturday night than call some "chat line" to talk to other fugly desperate and boring people for $3.99/minute.
When it comes down to it, that's mostly what livejournal, meetup, makoutclub and all these things are turning into. With some exceptions, most blogs are nothing than a flag waving "look out neat I am don't you want to get to know me?!" exercise to hook up.
It's sad. It's gross. It's pathetic.
Hook up at the clubs. Play games and learn stuff on the internet.
IT'S A TRAP!!!
It's really Men's A Babe.
Don't fall for those TV/TG tricks!
I support email servers for a living. I have for almost seven years - exclusively on Solaris, AIX and NT (though I do so on linux for my personal use).
While I think that your deployment is a reasonably sane one - as far as going the OSS/free route is concerned - I agree with the other poster here who said that having nobody to blame will be an issue in the future. When your job is on the line, it's good to have someone else who is supposed to know and fix everything for you when you are hard-up for solutions. Email administrators for the largest and biggest corporations in the world don't do it all in-house. Even they contract out for support for their enterprise level products. Because their customers and bosses expect great reliability and performance and features and they don't want to wait for several days (or longer) while you read some half-assed documentation on a website, chat up some gurus in IRC and post to some web forums and usenet groups hoping for help.
Also, there is nobody certifying that the products you are using will absolutely work together. And on whatever platform you're using. They may say they've tried it on it - but I doubt in many cases they will say it's been certified through a thorough internal QA process that weeds out a lot of bugs and such.
Also, when you really must have something fixed, you will either have to write the code yourself (laborious to do, without even talking about testing and implementing). If you have a commercial product and a contract, you can present a business case to get your issue some priority and have a fix. And you can always threaten to drop the product if they don't do what you want (it works more often than you'd think).
Even when full-fledged, thorough, all-encompassing high-capacity commercial servers - the position of email admin is a full time job for at least one or more people. Using a dozen different open source products and maintaining everything and keeping a constant sandbox environment to work in (you don't want to introduce upgrades or patches or changes on production, of course!) will consume all of your available time. If you are the full-time email admin here and that is your only responsibility - have at it. But if you have other responsibilities... I think the commercial path might be better for you.
Again - I'm an OSS advocate. Yet, I feel strongly that there are some cases in which commercial software and support is valuable. Depending on the specifics of your duties and position, this may or may not apply to you. But consider it. Especially if you're going to be fairly huge some day.
Another solution would be to contract with a third party. There are companies that do nothing but provide you with email solutions. They can do this based on very strong commercial products. These companies themselves will host and run the hardware for you. They will do all of the configuration and deployment and maintenance and administration for you. I'm not familiar with their prices, though - but do look into it. The upgrades and crashes and migrations are their responsibility. Meeting QOS is their responsibility. They will deal with the commercial mailserver vendor(s) for you. They already have support contracts with them. All you do is tell them how big of a deployment you want and you're set.
After working with commercial mailservers for several years, I was ready to setup a deployment of my own for my own personal project. Not having any funds, I decided I was going to go the OSS rout. Just figuring out what would work together and what wouldn't (you have to make sure your POP, IMAP and webmail servers all use the same mailbox formats. You have a gazillion options for accounting from LDAP to MySQL, countless authentication mechanisms, etc). It drove me nuts. It was at that point that I started to see the light and the real value in what I did with commercial products. Having an entire server that supports everything you could possibly need or want in an email solution through one install and one configur
Nobody ever got rich off character and honesty.
I would rather chat on AIM than via voice. I would rather get an email than discuss it via VoIP. I would rather play a game and type to people than chat with them in-game (ruins the flow and feel of the game's mood). And I certainly don't want to get in huge online "chat" communities via voice.
Stop treating the internet like a fucking night club or highschools you stupid fucks. Jesus fucking christ. ENOUGH ALREADY.
You leave my mom out of this.
Yes, but if everyone in this country is vaccinated against it and someone from the "outside" brings it in, who is it going to be able to affect?
We are the only country (or maybe one of two) that does mass circumcision. However, we do not have the highest longevity rate. So I don't know that it necessary justifies anything.
And this isn't 800AD. I'm pretty sure even if I were not circumcised, I could keep that fucker clean. You know - soap. Running water. Talc.
When was the last time parents had the doctor take out the kids' tonsils and appendix just after birth based on "we don't need it"?
I don't really care either way. I just think it's amusing that if we did something like this to females, we'd be considered a female genital mutilation nation. But since it's boys - it's all good.