[plug] re: last night

[adrian_blockley at dingoblue.net.au]

I have just reinstalled qmail after a break of about 10 months. It got
clobbered when I upgraded to RedHat 6.0.  My needs were not great and the
default config of Sendmail was suitable so I hadn't bothered about
replacing qmail.

Recent security discussions got me to thinking about qmail and I
reinstalled it last night - it is amazing how time dulls the memory. It
actually is fairly straight forward to set it up though I made things a
little more complex than I needed to by installing qmail with serialmail
which is supposed to ease the use of qmail with dialup connections.

Qmail seems fairly easy to administer. It has a series of control files in
a single directory which are used to configure the suit of programs that
make up qmail. I ended up with about 4 files with about 1 to 2 lines in
each file - much easier than sendmail's config files. I don't have many
controls to worry about but controlling features such as relaying seems
much easier than in sendmail, though I admit that the second party config
programs that are included with many Linux distributions probably hide
much of sendmail's configuration pain for simple tasks at least.

My biggest complaint is that the documentation while being complete is not
well organized.  If you don't know enough to know what controls you need
to look for it might take a while to scratch through all the man files
(there are quite a few).  I use Tkman to browse man pages and it certainly
made life easier by enabling quick flicking between the man pages. There
is some good documentation, which i found very useful, provided by various
users of qmail.  There are links to these on the qmail home page.  The two
i found most useful were the qmail-HOWTO
(http://www.flounder.net/qmail/qmail-howto.html) and "Life with qmail"
(http://web.infoave.net/%7Edsill/lwq.html).  The second reference is
particularly useful.  I would definitely read these and give the FAQ
(comes with the qmail source) a quick scan before attempting to install
qmail.

Oh well just my 2 cents worth.

Cheers

Adrian

On Wed, 14 Jun 2000, Colin Muller wrote:

> QMail has a good technical reputation. Have you been using it long, and
> have you used sendmail much for comparison? I've been thinking about
> changing my servers from sendmail, which is really a pain in some ways,
> and QMail is the only serious alternative in my book, but I guess I feel
> the need for more direct feedback than the reports I've come across on
> the Web.
> 
> So ... any particular hassles (or joys) with QMail to report? I've read
> the QMail blurbs, so I understand its technical accomplishments - it's
> more how it "feels" to administer that I'm interested in.
> 

--------------------------------------------------
Adrian Blockley	 
adrian_blockley at dingoblue.net.au
Ph 03 9571 4823