Sloan wrote:
Sandy Drobic wrote:
When I started learning about MTAs I tried to understand Sendmail and gave up when even the documentation and how-tos sounded like so much gibberish to me. Postfix on the other hand is documented very accurately. How long did it take you to get a grip on the basics of QMail?
Oh, our "look" at qmail was much more high level, we didn't invest the time required to get a grip on it. It was research, and then saying for each of our main functions "OK, we do this in sendmail, how can we accomplish the same thing in qmail?"
Nice. I wish I had the time to do that as well. (^-^) What were the features that differed the most in implementation or performance?
details we didn't like - mail queue files were referenced by inode number, so if we ever had to recover from a disaster, guess what? different inode numbers, and we're hosed. Also, we had thousands of aliases and redirects which change daily - postfix and sendmail easily handle this, but qmail seemed a bit more awkward to configure.
How were the lookups done, LDAP/SQL or flat files? What were the symptoms?
Lookups are done from local db files for optimum speed. The files are updated several times a day with automated scripts, but we need our mail gateways to be blazing fast, so the potential delay in waiting for ldap response from a remote lotus notes server running on windoze was unacceptable to us. Now that notes is being moved off of windoze and onto a p-series running AIX we may revisit that, but the current system works well.
Our domino servers are still running on windows. I am also using a script to extract all valid recipients with ldap lookups. Even for a relative low volume site as our company I decided to stay with the script instead of direct ldap lookups. I didn't have a reason yet to stress test the ldap server, and with postfix in front of the domino servers I probably never will.
Yes, Postfix as well as QMail were developed out of need for secure MTAs, as I just read on http://cr.yp.to/qmail.html. Wietse does take care not to introduce features that waste resources. Probably one of the reasons whey Suse changed to Postfix as the default MTA.
Thanks for the view of a (previous) Sendmail user. Did you have a look at Exim as well? When I took a casual look at their documentation it seemed quite nice.
We looked at exim, and it seemed to have some nice features - but we need to get the maximum mail throughput and minimum latency possib;e, and postfix was far and away the performance winner. BTW in researching benchmark results, I was unable to find any evidence of qmail's purported performance advantages over sendmail.
I would also like to see some test results done on the same hardware and the same base of testmails. -- Sandy List replies only please! Please address PMs to: news-reply2 (@) japantest (.) homelinux (.) com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org