On Mon, March 6, 2006 9:37 am, Nekusagi San wrote:
> What are the advantages of each option?
Real User Pros:
-Uses existing system accounts for authentication and Home directories
for storage
-Simplest to setup (basically on a Linux RPM based install, Courier"just
works" once the RPMS are installed and Courier is started)
-Supports Filesystem permission based shared folders (see
maildir/README.sharedfolders.txt from source for further details)
Real User Cons:
-System accounts must be created for each mail account. Many would
consider this a security risk (why should I have to allow a user shell
access if all they want is IMAP/SMTP?)
-No Virtual Shared Folders (ACLs, etc) support (see
maildir/README.sharedfolders.txt from source for further details)
-More difficult to maintain accounts when mail services are spread
across multiple servers.
Virtual User Pros:
-Unlimited number of backends to choose from (MySQL, Postgresql, LDAP
and userdb come standard, authcustom and authpipe make it easy to use
any backend with a little work)
-Extremely flexible configuration options.
-Allows for single username/password to be used for any other server
that can auth to the backend (e.g. LDAP, SQL, etc)
-Can scale easily to multiple servers for mail services
-Virtual Shared Folders (see maildir/README.sharedfolders.txt from
source for further details)
Virtual User Cons:
-Requires additional configuration, knowledge of backend of choice (need
to know basics of SQL or LDAP to maintain them)
-Mail services reliability becomes dependent upon reliability of backend
system.
These are just a few, others may chime in their opinions but in general,
I'd say if this is just a home system or you've already given all your
users shell access, use system accounts. If you have an existing LDAP or
SQL server with usernames/passwords, use virtual accounts. If you have
none of these and you're not sure what to go with, try MySQL based auth,
it's extremely flexible and powerful without being terribly difficult to
configure.
Jay
--
Jay Lee
Network / Systems Administrator
Information Technology Dept.
Philadelphia Biblical University
--
How would work the quota control
