On Wed, 15 Jul 2009 23:51:05 Anton Aylward wrote:

Rodney Baker said the following on 07/15/2009 09:27 AM:

...

My 2 laptops run openSUSE 11.0 (recently upgraded from 10.3) and have never had an MTA (postfix, exim or sendmail) installed. I too run a local IMAP server (dovecot) and smtp server (using sendmail) that also happens to be my main workstation (simply because I've not been able to afford a dedicated machine for a mail server and I don't have any working old machines to press into service).

So I can say with confidence that you *don't* need to have Postfix, Exim or Sendmail installed for openSuse to install and run.

When you install, just deselect the "Mail Server" pattern in Yast...

If you go back through the archives (around October 2008) you'll see that I've had an argument with Carlos an Per over this. I never found how to remove the mail server altogether and they said that I shouldn't want to.

If I delete Postix it forces me to install Exim.

I think that there are dependencies there that are only triggered once something is installed and you try to remove it. On my laptops I never installed Postfix or Exim and I've never had a problem (some of the config files *do* seem to get installed by default, and if you try to use Yast's MTA config module it will get upset, but the solution to that is easy - don't) ;-).

Personally I agree with you that it should not be necessary to install a MTA, but I was shouted down by so-called experts.

My 'old' machines are various. The firewall I got for $12 at the Salvation Army, an old HP Vectra. Runs IPCOP on a cable connection just fine!

IPCop Rocks! I used to have that running on an old PIII/500 with dual nics that wasn't much good for anything else. Unfortunately something on the motherboard eventually failed and it simply refused to do anything, so I got a wireless router with firewall built in (WRT54GL with oss firmware installed soon after purchase). That's cheaper to run than the old PIII and less noisy to boot. ;-) I've actually got an old HP server sitting in a rack in the garage that has an array of about 6 30GB SCSI discs in it. I haven't powered it up recently but I was assured that it worked when it was given to me and it should run Linux quite nicely. I was going to turn that into a NAS box and maybe run the mail server on it too (but I'm dreading the power bill if it is running 24/7). -- =================================================== Rodney Baker VK5ZTV rodney.baker@iinet.net.au ===================================================