>Now, the whole idea was, the fewer boxes to support the better, and
>I'd still lean that way if I could find something practical that will:
>a) work on NT
i'm not familiar with that realm of software myself, so i can't advise you.
i don't recall ever hearing of anything which was feature-compatible with,
easier to maintain, and more stable on NT than the traditional packages
running under unix, though.
>b) handle DNS for multiple domains
on unix systems, 'named' handles DNS for an arbitrary number of domains by
default. it takes a bit of learning to get used to the config files and
name records, but once you have the moves down, adding and editing domains
is pretty simple.
>c) handle sendmail duties including email addresses
>for multiple domains with the same name going to different people (ie.
>[EMAIL PROTECTED] and [EMAIL PROTECTED] going to two different
>people)
that's not the default setting of sendmail, but it's certainly possible.
my mailserver at work hosts 170+ domains worth of addresses, with each
domain's addresses completely independent of the others. the setup time
for a new domain is about 3-5 minutes, and the time required to add a new
address to an existing domain is about a minute.
with a good working knowledge of regular expressions, and some familiarity
with the sendmail address handling rules, you can do all sorts of
funky/godawful things your mail delivery. ;-)
d) handle autoresponders e) handle listservs
procmail is a well-respected and powerful mail-handling utility that ties
in comfortably (and with fairly good security) to sendmail. it does
autoresponse, forwarding, delivery to files, and a whole mess of other
stuff.
majordomo is my personal favorite as far as listserv software goes.
again, it ties well to sendmail, and is quite sane once you get used to it.
as an added benefit, its primary developer is a member of this list, so you
always know where to run for help. ;-)
>Any ideas?
going back to your original idea.. fewer machines means fewer headaches..
i'd like to offer an opposing viewpoint:
my personal preference is to have several machines, with each machine
dedicated to a single, well-defined purpose. coming at it from a crash
recovery position, it's not that hard to back up, blow away, and rebuild
from scratch a machine which is strictly a mailserver, or a webserver, or
whatever.
in my experience, it's been more difficult to rebuild a single
mailserver/webserver/nameserver/secure server than it is to rebuild four
independent machines which support the same list of services. there's
more bookkeeping, and no two services are ever entirely independent. the
user account for this email address is also the owner of that set of web
files, with FTP access over there, etc. any time you touch one service,
you have to make sure you're not stepping on any of the others.
single-tasking your machines also gives you better stability of service
overall, because a glitch which crashes one machine doesn't take out your
entire server base. if you have the resources and the need, it's also
easier to manage failover to redundant hardware if you keep each machine as
well-defined as possible.
IMHO, setting up a separate linux box as your nameserver/mailserver will be
more stable, and just as easy to maintain over the long run, as adding more
software and configuration information to an existing machine.
there's certainly a nontrivial learning curve to using the software
packages i've listed, though.. you can achieve guru status for really
knowing the ins and outs of any one of them. in the final analysis,
though, i think they're very good tools, and that learning them will serve
you well over time.
mike stone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 'net geek..
been there, done that, have network, will travel.
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