On Sunday, December 13, 2015 6:24:50 AM EDT, Heiko Schlittermann wrote:
Hi,
Nonetheless, it's easier for (at least some) people to understand the
exim4 file than the Debian stuff. I tried to stick to the debconf
mechanism when I first had my VPS, but it became just too hard to keep
track of where everything was and how the variables interacted, as
soon as I wanted to do non-trivial things. A single text file is much
easier to find one's way about.
It probably should be pointed out, that the debian configuration stuff
makes the Exim configration roughly comparable with the complexity of
configuring Fostpix. But Exim goes further than Fostpix, but I'd say 80%
of the users don't care.
And for 80% of the users of Exim it's sufficient to have the Debian
config way. The last 20% may want to go into the details of the
native configuration. But this does not allow me (as one of the
20%) to ignore the 80%.
Keep in mind that the "Debian config way" has TWO options: the "split"
configuration, and the non-split configuration. I use the non-split
configuration so that there's just one big configuration file to edit.
If Exim has a significant market 'share', then that's because of Debian, I
suppose.
It's not. Debian Developers thought this same thing when the choice of
default MTA was last discussed in 2013 in [debian-devel] whereby this
survey was mentioned (which is updated once a month) showing that Exim
became the most popular MTA in 2008, and has remained most popular since.
http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/man.201511/mxsurvey.html
Others looked further at the bottom of the survey pages, and found that (at
least at that time) the versions of Exim that were most popular /weren't/
the versions that Debian shipped.
Even I personally don't like the Debian config stuff, I think if the
Debian way of configuration can be generalized and get part of the Exim
distribution. Because from what I see it provides a kind of interface
that could allow easy integration into configuration management systems
that exist outside the Debian universum. In a much better way than the
classic exim.conf, that is more of the TIMTOWTDI style of thinking.
About two years ago I set up Exim on RHEL 6 and had to set up an exim.conf
file directly, and found it a lot more difficult than using Debian's
default non-split exim4.conf.template file. I ended up copy-pasting a
bunch of config snippets from the Debian default Exim4 config to get things
up and running faster.
In general the suggestion to use a "standard" exim.conf file is probably
fine, except that in /this particular case/ the person being given this
advice is an admin who has stated he isn't familiar with Exim cofigs, which
makes this a problematic suggestion because it's a fair bit of work to do
the conversion. One needs to become familar with the MTA configs, how to
test them, etc. When one is asking about fixing a specific IPv6 vs IPv4
problem probably isn't the best time to suggest this.
I'm wondering if "interface = <IPv4_address>" could be used within the
remote_smtp transport to force using a local IPv4 address outbound.
-- Chris
--
Chris Knadle
[email protected]
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