OT: mail server

From: Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner <spc_at_conman.org>
Date: Thu Apr 8 15:50:02 2004

It was thus said that the Great chris once stated:
>
> In fact, like you point out, since I want to run on old hardware, I may
> be better off going with something that isn't going to expect me to
> constantly add to it... that way once it is running, I can just leave it
> running and not have to worry about regular updates (probably the single
> biggest reason why I won't run Windows based internet servers... they
> expect you to do updates too often, I don't have the time/desire to jerk
> around with that).

  As someone who ran a mailserver on old hardware (33MHz 486 with 20M RAM
running RedHat 5.2 with a Linux 2.0.39 kernel) I had no problems with it:

[root]tower:/root> uptime
 10:43pm up 443 days, 22:57, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
[root]tower:/root>

  A bit sluggish and very relunctant to run *anything* written in Perl, but
other than that, running two dozen websites, and email, it chugged along for
four years (decommisioned in June of 2003, but had I run it another month or
so, the uptime would have wrapped).

  I would recommend running something *other* than sendmail, if only because
sendmail is a piece of Swiss cheese when it comes to security and it's only
of *when*, not *if* there is another security hole found. Towards the end I
did run Postfix without noticable degredation.

> >I haven't run Sendmail in aeons;
>
> I've heard enough horror stories about Sendmail to know that I probably
> don't want to use it. From what I gather, its great, IF you know how to
> use it... but if you are new to it, be prepared to move the sacrificial
> lambs off the SCSI god alter and onto the Sendmail god alter.
> (Ironically, Sendmail is the only *nix mailer I have used already... I'm
> running it on both my web servers for handling emails created by web
> forms... but I didn't really have to do much to get it up and running,
> just a little tweaking to lock it down from the outside)

  Postfix comes with a "sendmail" replacement, so anything that calls
sendmail will run generally without modification, which is quite nice
actually.

  -spc (Oh, and I should mention that the 486 server mentioned aboved
        *was* colocated at a hosting facility ... )
Received on Thu Apr 08 2004 - 15:50:02 BST

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