On Wed, 10 Dec 2003, Jeremy Kitchen wrote: >> Soon I'll ask the maillist, "Will bincimap have an option >> in the future to run as a dedicated server?" Because that >> is what I prefer. >and you'll likely get "no" because tcpserver is the 'dedicated server' >part. tcpserver works very very well, there's no reason not to use it. >Why don't you just break down and use it? :)
The answer is no, indeed, because Binc IMAP should have as little logic in it as possible. In practise, there is no noticable difference between a dedicated server and a tcp wrapped server. "Break down and use it" - now that's not really helpful, Jeremy. :-) In John's defence, tcpserver, inetd, xinetd or whichever tcp wrapper will all do the job. tcpserver has its advantages, but it's also old, practically unmaintained (which is, arguably, a good thing as it has no known bugs) and lacks several features that are important today, but weren't important when it was originally written. The last update to the ucspi-tcp package was March 18th 2000. I can say that tcpserver does its job, it's secure, it's somewhat extensible and there are patches that give it support for some of today's requirements such as IPv6 and DoS protection, filtering based on regular expression matching of IP addresses, rate controlling. It's a real problem with all of DjB's software. It is absolutely reliable, cross-platform, standards compliant and all, but "when is qmail II coming?" ;-) xinetd has rate control, IPv6 support, DoS protection, support for UDP, single-point-of-configuration and more, but has the disadvantage that if it crashes, it pulls down all the services attached to it. It also has to run as root, so an exploit could pull down your system. tcpserver can run unprivileged. My opinion is that these are all tools with pros and cons, and it's no good to blindly throw away any of these because they "suck" or "there's no reason to use it". :-) Andy :-) -- Andreas Aardal Hanssen | http://www.andreas.hanssen.name/gpg Author of Binc IMAP | "It is better not to do something http://www.bincimap.org/ | than to do it poorly."
