On Fri, October 8, 2010 5:45 pm, Ron Guerin wrote: > Ben Stoutenburgh wrote: >> >> >> On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 5:09 PM, Ron Guerin <[email protected] >> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: >> >> I'm engaging you in a bit of self-education really. If Fedora >> switched >> back to Sendmail, it's news to me, and kind of horrific news at >> that. I >> can't speak for the OP, but problems with "postdrop", wherever he >> saw >> this, is a pretty good indicator that he's running Postfix. >> >> Any chance you specifically asked for Sendmail when you did your >> install? >> >> >> I can't think of a version of Fedora that did not have Sendmail >> installed by default. It has been a member of the Base package group >> forever to be LSB compliant. > > If that's true, virtually every other major Linux distro is not LSB > compliant, in a way that makes LSB compliance sound like a bad thing.
Yeah that doesn't sound right. If that were true then why would RHEL be running Postfix? I bet the LSB requirement is likely only that the link to "sendmail" (i.e. /usr/bin/sendmail) point to the MTA and be a "Sendmail work-alike". > The move away from Sendmail (an act of sanity) was underway a long time > ago. Debian and its children have been installing Exim for as long as I > can remember. IIRC Debian defaulted to installing Exim at least as far back as Slink, which was released sometime in the late 90's. > In thinking about this, I may be mixing up Red Hat Linux > which switched to Postfix, with Fedora, which... switched back? That > truly is a horror, and I can't believe it's taken them so long to see > the error of their ways if that's the case. The last time I was helping run a Fedora box it came with Sendmail by default, which I quickly replaced with Postfix. >> There is some debate among the developer to remove this, but that >> will not change prior to Fedora 15 >> (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/NoMTA). >> > > This article says only that they wish to make _an_ MTA optional. > That's neither here nor there about which one they install by default. > For the record, I'm opposed to the idea. All systems should have a > functioning MTA upon installation, because for umpteen hundred years > now, everything depends on using it to send administrative messages. Occasionally I run systems without any MTA; it works in the short-term, but I eventually end up installing an MTA in order to receive important warning messages. So while I'm not opposed to the idea of making an MTA optional in theory, in practice I also find it's needed. The only place I can see a lack of an MTA is for embedded devices that just don't have the space for one. However that said, far too often what you'll find is that an MTA is installed by default, but not configured to upload mail anywhere, and also with nobody reading the local mail. Depending on how you look at this, this is either only slightly better or possibly worse than having no MTA installed at all. How many people on this list bother to configure their desktops and laptops to allow forwarding mail to an external mail server? [I just recently had to do this, but before that I never bothered.] -- Chris -- Chris Knadle [email protected] _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Nov 3 - Open Source Hardware: Bugs, Beagles and Beyond Dec 1 - IBM's Open Client Deployment Jan 5 - Building a Comunity Site with Drupal
