On Mon, 17 Mar 2003, Kenneth Illingsworth wrote: > My apologies in advance if this already made it to the listserv. I have reason to > believe that it did not make it though since we are using an old version of > GroupWise (v5.5) running on evan an older version of Novell (V4.11), and the action > status of 'pending' does little for my confidence. Hence my sudden and extreme > interest in Postfix as a replacement MTA. Here is what I tried to send to the > existing thread:
Please, encourage your email client to wrap lines. That was rather hard to read on my 128-wide screen. > --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Choice 2 below sounds good. Unfortunately, I do not know where the %post and %preun > scripts are. Nor can I seem to get the find command to zero in on them. Can I > assume that they can be edited with vi? You need the source package which you edit to taste and rebuild. > Additinally, my standard way to uninstall a package is to do so from within the > package tree in Webmin. However, the 'alternatives' package is not contained within > that list! The man pages do not indicate such, but I suspect that there is an > unistall parameter like RPM --uninstall <package name> available? As always, rpm --help man rpm I have some reservations about the use of non-standard packages and procedures with vendor's releases. If you can keep with one vendor for all your software needs, then you have a fairly simple life keeping track of vulnerabilities from a single source, and you can be confident that when the time comes to upgrade your software, your vendor's procedures have been tested for your environment and will most likely work. When you bring in third-party software to assist with that maintenance, such as webmin, then you introduce the worry that it might do something differently. It might be that webmin is entirely compatible with the way Red Hat, SuSE, Turbo Linux and Debian do things, but I wouldn't bet on it. Perhaps when it's a standard part of the distro (as it is in Debian), it's been coerced to comply. Similarly, you have the question as to how well Postfix will fit into the way your vendor does things. Vendors have their own ways of initialising the system and maintaining its configuration, each is different from the others. Those differences contribute to different people's views as to which distribution is "right for us," and they won't go away. Red Hat, in RHL 7.x, ships one MTA, and that is sendmail. If you don't believe that MTA is suitable for your use, and you are using Red Hat Linux, then I suggest you look at the exim package shipped with Red Hat Linux 8.0. The _only_ reason I suggest this as the first-choice replacement is that it is reasonable to suppose Red Hat will include it in the next release of RHL for S/390 & zSeries, and so any additional maintenance issues will terminate at that time. If you think neither of those suitable, then you really are on your own and you need to allow for the extra maintenance costs associated with your choice, and you should consider hiring or otherwise obtaining competant support for your choice. Now, if you're not using RHL, the points still apply; I'm sure you can translate to one of the other vendors. You are, of course, entitled to mix and match as much as you like, and I've done it for years on my home computers where there are no commercial realities. The premier distro for the mix&match croud has to be Debian, with almost 9000 packages shipped as standard in Woody. -- Cheers John. Join the "Linux Support by Small Businesses" list at http://mail.computerdatasafe.com.au/mailman/listinfo/lssb
