Rodney Baker wrote:
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).
That's correct, I would say. In postfix, local delivery is handled by "local", one of postfix' components. I guess I tend to use "MTA" to mean the whole postfix/sendmail/exim package.
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.
How the users accesses his mail is somewhat independent of how it is delivered locally. When you use POP3 or IMAP, the mail has still got to be delivered <somewhere> until it is retrieved.
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* -
I'm not sure what OPs concern really was, but the above is certainly true. It is not something particular to openSUSE, it is also the case for the other popular distros.
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.
If space is really so limited, the OP should probably opt for a different distro. There are distros out there that are optimized for e.g. embedded systems or from running from a single floppydisk or USB stick. Trying to argue that openSUSE, a general purpose distro forming the basis of SLED and SLES, should include an option not to have an MTA installed, is an exercise in futility IMHO.
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.
Does the non-expert user really have a need to install a general purpose distro as a trimmed down light system? If so, all you have to do is deselect the GUI, and you'll have a pretty minimal system that'll easily fit in less than 1G. /Per -- /Per Jessen, Zürich -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org