Bob Dew says:
> How would this fit into a network that consists of 10,000 PCs, 3,500
> Macs, 1,000 UNIX hosts and various other platforms, as ours does?
Easily. Trivially. I've been involved in systems with thousands of
Unix hosts and PCs before. You aren't unique.
> Could you dedicate a dozen or so IMAP servers for campus mail service?
> Maybe. But how then would you establish 1) consistent userid mappings;
> 2) a common authentication service; 3) a central management framework
> for handling account generation, backup, archiving and general mail
> store administration and maintenance?
First of all, it woudln't take a dozen machines. Second of all, as
I've noted, a decent management system will handle everything you've
just mentioned.
1) Consistant uid mappings: if you have several thousand machines, you
need a management system already, and it will take care of this.
2) Common authentication service: kerberos, same as AFS uses.
3) Central management framework: as I've noted, if you already have a
management system capable of handling thousands of machines, what
is the problem?
> The DCE framework can handle most of this nicely.
Try getting some random ten year old mac to run DFS or AFS. They all
run POP without a single problem. Try convincing people to buy a DFS
license for every PC in their organization just to run email. Indeed,
the solution is woefully inefficient in any case -- a specialized
protocol handles the problem with less CPU load, less dependancy on
central resources that can break down and cripple everyone, etc.
> this kind of application. If DFS is part your DCE framework, it might
> be worth working it in somehow to manage the mail store. Without it,
> you need to cook up a lot of home-grown management tools to administer
> the servers.
The DCE has no even remotely reasonable management tools. There is
nothing in it that can compete with MIT Moira, the Moira we cooked up
at Lehman Brothers, Enterprise System's Management's Mesa product,
etc. I doubt you even know what a management system looks like.
Anyway, I'm sick of this conversation, so I'm dropping out. I suspect
that it is no more possible to convince you not to use a distributed
file system to handle your email than it was possible to convince you
that unencrypted non-authenticated IP data is not something to base
your system security on.
Perry
