[Sysadmin] setting up qmail

John Handelaar john at userfrenzy.com
Fri Nov 14 23:42:30 CST 2008


2008/11/15 David Kaufman <david at gigawatt.com>:
> So last time, on tempest, we installed qmail from source iirc.  But I've
> been running qmail on debian, using the "unofficial" deb packages from
> here:
>
>  http://smarden.sunsite.dk/pape/Debian/
>
> ever since *woody* ...so I wonder if anyone objects to my adding that repo
> to the apt sources list, and letting the package management system install
> and manage qmail.  I'd also prefer to run djbdns than bind, and would
> volunteer to be responsible for its administration.
>
> What do you guys think?  Strong feelings one way or 'tuther?  Pros?  Cons?

Con.

I put it in.  It exists outside of apt (which sucks) and the
qmail-haters aren't wrong inasmuch as nobody actually understands
enough about patched versions in circulation to know whether there are
vulnerabilities, and there's no ongoing security 'coverage'.

I put it in because (for the record) we got vpopmail and qmailrocks
provided a nice bundle of spam and virus coverage, multihoming and
web-based admin.  Plus the raw speed of qmail.

>From here, on balance, I'm not sure we shouldn't go with exim4 this
time.  I'm told the speed is much the same or better (and frankly it's
not like LEO is exactly nippy these days), it's security-covered and
one assumes that mailman and clamav and spamd integrate rather more
easily.

I'm happy to be told otherwise since Dean's actually been running the
thing and adding shims and sticky tape to ameliorate some of our
current MTA's horrors for the last few years on his own.

Remember:  mail-wise, we don't just run LEO and EO, but also
css-discuss.org/ and lists.c-d.o for Eric.

And we'll probably want to update our install of mailman.  Though I'm
hoping nobody will have to manually work through years of
crappily-maintained mailbox files and regenerate the archives from
scratch like I did last time.

And (last time I'll be raining on this parade for some hours) -- we
need a sensible plan for rolling the mail over from one host to the
other.


I'm not going to comment on the djbdns thing because that's frankly
the talk of a madman.  'make' to update a zone file?  Ya loon...


jh



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