Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: "Austad
To: "'gentoo-user@g.o'" <gentoo-user@g.o>, "'gentoo-dev@g.o'" <gentoo-dev@g.o>
Subject: RE: [gentoo-dev] RE: [gentoo-user] Sendmail
Date: Wed, 06 Feb 2002 10:30:56
Message-Id: 54180709DD3FE145917BB165AFE7EFA003514DC1@mspexch2.office.mktw.net
1 > On Wed, 6 Feb 2002, Austad, Jay wrote:
2 >
3 > > sendmail == devil
4 > > Use postfix. :)
5 > >
6 >
7 > Care to explain? What's the disadvantage of sendmail except that its
8 > harder to configure?
9
10 Sendmail has a long long history of security holes, it runs as root, it
11 spawns a single process which can be a bottleneck under high loads
12 (especially with a single cpu box), and it's a pain to configure and manage.
13 That whole m4 config thing really sucks.
14
15 Postfix has almost no history of security holes (except for a DoS attack
16 awhile back), it runs as a normal user and can be chrooted for more
17 security, it runs multiple processes for outgoing and incoming mail, and
18 administration can be done completely through the postconf command with no
19 editing of config files (which makes it great for clustering and making the
20 same changes across all boxes with a single command). You can remove
21 messages from the running queue. And it's extremely fast.
22
23 Qmail is fast. But, after using it for over a year on about 12 different
24 boxes I've replaced it with postfix. Qmail used to be faster than postfix,
25 but this is no longer the case. It's a pain to administer, logging sucks
26 bigtime, any modifications must be done as a patch because of DJB's screwed
27 up licensing scheme. Qmail touches the disk about 3 times more than
28 postfix, so if you have slow disks or a ton of mail, disk i/o will most
29 likely be your bottleneck here (actually, on most mailservers disk IO is the
30 bottleneck).
31
32 I haven't used sendmail in about 2 years. After switching from qmail to
33 postfix about 3 months ago, my life is much much easier.
34
35 I don't want to start a flame war, but I'm sure this probably will. :)
36
37 Jay

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RE: [gentoo-dev] RE: [gentoo-user] Sendmail gentoo-user@××××××××.net