Hi
I wish I had read a mail like this before I started installing qmail on my
server,
which is exactly why I'm writing it. Call it frustration.
There may be a lot of unjust information in here! If you're seriously
reading this,
read all the replies too. I hope someone who _really_ knows qmail will correct
me where I'm wrong.
Qmail claims it's a replacement for sendmail.
They say 'after installing, read the docs,there are some minor differences'
:-) LOL! But beware. That's vaporware.
Once you have it up & working, qmail is great. It's better than sendmail.
It's easier to understand, monitor, configure. Read all about it somewhere
else.
Qmail is a package of programs, all neatly documented and worked out, to do
something like sendmail does. It does it a whole lot different though. If
you want
it to behave like sendmail, you need to do a lot of things _after_
installing qmail.
You even need to install things that are not in the package, which you have
to find
online somewhere (checkpasswd ?). Therefore, qmail is not a (complete)
replacement
for sendmail.
Should you install qmail ?
---------------
First of all, consider these:
* You have to deinstall sendmail before starting to install qmail. While
installing
qmail, you won't be able to do mail. Also, you will probably make quite some
changes to your fs, which makes it hard to just give up and reinstall
sendmail.
It's a good idea to completely backup your system so you'll be able to
swap it
back in once you really fall asleep and things are still not working.
* There are some differences in securitymechanisms, for better or for worse.
* Qmail is probably also more inviting to hackers, just because it's more
human.
* Some experience is necessary. It may take you some hours. Don't use an
RPM (as of
this date); qmail is _not_ fsstnd. Install it 'by hand', step by step.
----------------
Now,
If you're just a single user, you have some sparetime left, you hate sendmail
and like the fancy rumours about qmail, try it. Especially, if you've just
installed
your system out of the box, and never heard of sendmail, never had any mail,
this is the moment to install qmail. Don't use sendmail, it's awfull.
If you have a server with several users, things may get messy. You've never
realised how many users you have untill they all start complaining, believe me,
I know :-)
If you're have problems with sendmail, qmail may be the solution. The other
solution
is to hire a Sendmail Guru, someone that actually read the book :-)
But here are some of the things you're going to face:
- qmail doesn't do /var/spool/mail. it tries to keep
the mailboxes in the users' homedirectories (which is better). If you want
to do that,
move all your mbox files to the users' homedirs .. there u go. If you don't
want that,
read a whole lot of docs before you install qmail.
-in fact, qmail-pop3d doesn't do any mbox format, it wants
to use the Maildir format (which really is better). If you want to use
that, you should
convert all your mbox files to maildirs ... someway. In the package, there
is a tool
supplied to do the reverse: MailDir to Mbox files :-)
- qmail-pop3d doesn't work without a passwordchecker. you need to get it
somewhere
online and change some lines in some initfiles to get it working.
If all of the above 2 things scare you, don't use qmail-pop3d...you need to
use some
other popdeamon and get it to cooporate with qmail. There's a techy bit ....
And then you're not really 'running qmail', you're just using some bits of
the qmail package. Things may get tricky when all the bugs arrive and you
need to update.
-qmail doesn't do .forward files, it uses .qmail files (which are better).
If you want
to use them, edit and rename all .forward files ... ... there u go.
There's also a patch (dotforward) for using .forward files.
-qmail doesn't read /etc/aliases. It reads info from /var/qmail/ (which is
better).
...you get the point. Yes, there is a patch (fastforward) to run if you
want /etc/aliases.
--------------
In practice, a lot of things didn't work at my server. I had to move all
the mboxes,
rename & edit all .forward files (dotforward barfed), and decided not to
even try fastforward
Things were still not working and I had to invent complex workarounds.
A lot of handwork ... a week later, I had to do it all over again, to try
and fix it.
The users got funny errors and received all the mail they left on
the server several times .... even on such a small system as mine,
it was HELL.
I'm glad I have it running & I like it.
But would I have known all this, I wouldn't have done it.
Sendmail, after all, was working fine.
cu
*PIKE*
...*..P.i.k.e...*....
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.kw.nl/~pike - desktop
icq: 4322610
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
by Eric S. Raymond
http://www.redhat.com/knowledgebase/cathedral-bazaar.html
I anatomize a successful free-software project, fetchmail, that was
run as a deliberate test of some surprising theories about software
engineering suggested by the history of Linux. I discuss these
theories in terms of two fundamentally different development styles,
the ``cathedral'' model of most of the commercial world versus the
``bazaar'' model of the Linux world. I show that these models derive
from opposing assumptions about the nature of the
software-debugging task. I then make a sustained argument from the
Linux experience for the proposition that ``Given enough eyeballs, all
bugs are shallow'', suggest productive analogies with other
self-correcting systems of selfish agents, and conclude with some
exploration of the implications of this insight for the future of software.
