Per Jessen said the following on 10/25/2008 12:49 PM:
[big snip about email - I didn't quite get your point]
That's clear. Its also clear I've seen many operations where syslog is of more importance and email is the audit side.
[..]
No, this is not about controlling.
SNMP is not just about monitoring. Its has control & configuration capability as well.
Which distro were you running? [...]
Well, I have difficulty in believing that Solaris, AIX and HPUX all manage perfectly well without postfix/sendmail/exim/<anyMTA>, but I don't have enough experience with those to contradict you. Still, why don't you run openSolaris if that does what you want?
You asked me what I've run, you didn't ask about the settings, the context. If I really want to be picky I could add my cell phone. I also have a wireless router than runs an embedded Linux. They don't have MTA and their context is a little more self apparent. And yes, some of those enterprise networks had workstations & headless devices that had a simple dumb forwarder.
You stated very clearly that "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.". I'm only asking how you did it, that's all.
We've drifted from the original point which was that openSUSE Postfix demanded you have the LDAP libraries installed. The Mandriva I was running immediately before I installed openSUSE-11.0 from the LiveCD didn't have that dependency. I should check the sources to see if openSUSE has a compile option for no ldap and how that would affect packaging. The old config ... had a laptop mode where it was running on batteries a lot of things that were installed were turned off and the disk and screen shut down sooner and more stuff like that. One of the things it did was check to see if it was on the home LAN. If not there was no MTA. So in that case it didn't matter what MTA I had installed... or none. But the key issue wasn't WHICH MTA, but that the MTA didn't have a ridiculous dependency list. As a final note, you seem to think that the MTA is the deciding factor for me. The MTA is an incidental. This thread was originally about dependencies. As I pointed out, without a specifically configured MTA many users won't see the system generated mails. They may as well not be there, not happen. It doesn't matter that the default install delivers to localhost; /var/spool/mail/root may as well be linked to /dev/null. The problem is that various utilities need the MTA since mail needs a 'receiver'. There should be an alternative "null" MTA that just does "cat - > /dev/null" and doesn't depend on ldap. If the user isn't part of a, for example, corporate network, then what's the point of this mail? The user isn't going to see it. If you don't like the example of how Microsoft Windows deals with 'alarms', that is events which have to be reported to the user because of a non-trivial error (as opposed to audit events which are probably turned off for a 'home' user), then look how it was dealt with on the various version of the Macintosh, before and after OSX. But once again, the real issue isn't what MTA, its that the present install means that useful facilities such as CRON drag in a MTA that drags in other stuff like LDAP. Setting MAILTO="" won't do anything about that dependency chain. In this thread we've dragged in a lot of other things, but the essentials are about the dependency chain. Regardless of whether or not a MTA is needed, making ldap a dependency is the kind of idiotic 'bloatware' that we might expect from Microsoft. ------ I just checked the sources. The "-DHAS_LDAP" compile-time option enables LDAP in Postfix. Yes, it can be built without the need for LDAP. There's also a note which makes me think that the LDAP support _could_ be pluggable. It says that installing the "postfix-ldap" package will do the job, so presumably if you don't it isn't. It seems that openSUSE have chosen not to go that way. As I said right at the beginning of this thread, it is a decision point. It could have been made the other way. -- Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. --John Stuart Mill -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org