Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2114 mails)

[Rodney Baker <rodney.baker@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sunday 26 October 2008 00:16:25 Per Jessen wrote:
[...snip...]
> > I'm perfectly well aware of how to set up Postfix, and, for my sins,
> > sendmail before that.  I've been using Postfix for over a decade both
> > on my home system and in large (> 50 server, > 1,000 users) enterprise
> > settings as well as for ISPs.  I run it on my own home network on a
> > dedicated mail hub.  However before I installed openSUSE none of my
> > non-mail hub machines and in the specific not my laptop or desk
> > workstation ran Postfix, exim, sendmail or other such MTA.
>
> Which distro were you running? Maybe it was a better option for you.
> I'm curious though, how did you manage to receive the various systems
> alerts and messages without a local MTA?  Did you write your
> own /usr/sbin/sendmail to drop the text directly into the filesystem?

Pardon me for butting in, but my understanding is that local delivery of mail 
is the job of the MDA (mail *delivery* agent) not the MTA (mail *transfer* 
agent).

Sendmail is not an MDA - it does not deliver local mail to a user's mailbox. 
It is designed to transfer mail between hosts. Local delivery is the job of 
something like procmail.

Postfix and Exim, as I understand, include both MTA and MDA functionality. I 
agree - you do need to have an MDA running to locally delivery user's mail to 
their mailboxes, unless the users are solely accessing an external mailserver 
via POP3, IMAP or the like using a client such as Kmail, Evolution etc. in 
which case no local MDA is needed, *unless* the user also wants to receive 
adminstrative emails from the local machine that are normally directed to 
root.

My understanding of the original poster of this thread was concerned that 
sendmail/Postfix/Exim were dependencies that *could not be uninstalled without 
breaking the system to the point of unusability* - the concern was that since 
his machine was either stand-alone or client-only and was very limited on disk 
space, that these services should be able to be uninstalled (or not installed 
in the first place) without breaking the whole system.

In that regard, I tend to agree. Forget the enterprise or other scenarios - 
this is solely regarding the case of a minimal install on a resource-limited 
client machine that has absolutely no need for an MTA to be installed. Even 
client software such as Kmail/Evolution/Thunderbird can send via an external 
mail server.

IMHO, modern Linux distributions (and I'm not referring just to openSUSE) have 
made it increasingly difficult to install a trimmed down "lite" system by 
introducing many dependencies that, on the surface, to the non-expert user 
(and even to some more knowledgeable users) appear nonsensical. Others 
(including, apparently, the developers and project managers) see it 
differently and that is OK.

I guess that is where the truly "lite" distros such as Puppy and DSL fit in. 
Following on from that, since openSUSE is effectively the community 
"development" distro for SLED and SLES, it is unlikely that we'll ever see a 
really "lite-capable" version of openSUSE for resource-constrained hardware 
unless someone external to the project builds it specifically for that 
purpose.

I'll butt out again now :-).

Cheers,


-- 
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Rodney Baker VK5ZTV
rodney.baker@xxxxxxxxxxxx
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