Sendmail hasn't been a scary beast in many years. Yes, sendmail has a scary history but we just shouldn't talk about that anymore because it is all in the past. The new sendmail is maintained by competent programmers who are trying to provide a first class MTA/MSA. Sendmail hasn't been a scary beast in many years, but the way people install it still is. There does not need to be a sendmail daemon listening to port 25 on every machine. There merely needs to be a sendmail program locally that programs can call to send mail out to a primary mail server. Instead of putting "/usr/lib/sendmail -bd -q15m" onto every machine, just put "/usr/lib/sendmail -q15m". The server will run to process the queue, but not accept incoming connections. If a program needs to deal with an SMTP server, then it can talk to the secure SMTP server. The new sendmail does not need to be suid root anymore. It can be an unpriviledged program and still work properly. The new sendmail is easy to configure! Well, you have to know m4, but you don't really need to know very much m4 for a simple install. I have a Makefile and a couple of definition files, and when I install a new version of sendmail I just have to change one symlink and then type 'make' to reproduce everything for the new version. I could automate the generation of the symlink if I was really lazy. On Wed, Oct 17, 2001 at 11:45:12AM -0400, Marcus J. Ranum wrote: > >Are you suggesting that admin workstations run SMTP servers? > > I have a super-tiny mail-sending program that knows how to SMTP > out a message without requiring a real MTA. Would it be worth my > cleaning it up and making it available? (It's written for an old > version of UNIX and it'd probably require some "porting" to > work on Linux or whatever) -- William Colburn, "Sysprog" <wcolburnat_private> Computer Center, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology http://www.nmt.edu/tcc/ http://www.nmt.edu/~wcolburn --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: loganalysis-unsubscribeat_private For additional commands, e-mail: loganalysis-helpat_private
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Wed Oct 17 2001 - 14:01:25 PDT