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CNN on Sendmail for NT 101

Posted by Roblimo from the reporters-cover-the-darndest-things dept.
J. Pierpont writes "CNN has an article on, of all things, sendmail. The unusual thing is that sendmail for NT is not open source. The article goes on to highlight some of the security advantages that it has over Exchange Server. I still think it's odd that CNN would have an article about sendmail."
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CNN on Sendmail for NT More

CNN on Sendmail for NT

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  • "Public folders" can be handled by any decent imap server -- say, cyrus. And Outlook can use them.
  • 1. You can replicate IMAP folders, too.
    2. You can gate them to NNTP, but then you will lose user-level access control (just like with Exchange).
  • Posted by NJViking:

    I worked for 2 years as a MS Exchange admin (4.0, 5.0, 5.5) before I wised up and took a job doing Sun Solaris :)

    We had Microsoft consultants come in and design the network. Now get this: we had roughly 30 leaf Exchange sites in the state of NJ, but with only *1* hub. In Pennsylvania, we had 1 hub serving 1 leaf node. How screwed up was that?

    Result: Exchange, furiously trying to run as its own MTA would have the NJ hub clobbered with messages waiting to get transferred. It was a total nightmare for us. (Not to mention the fact that the Microsoft consultants who set up the infrastructure for us totally screwed up.)

    Sendmail as an MTA would work perfectly in this situation. I don't know how reliable it would be running under NT.

    We once set up a Solaris 2.61 on a Sun Enterprise 250 and send a million messages at it with 1 meg attachments with a script. The box didn't even BLINK! The only problem which made it poop out was a full /var partition.

    What would happen if we aimed a million messages with 1 meg attachments at an Exchange MTA? BSOD. How about Sendmail for NT? Only time will tell..

    -= NJV =-
  • No... They're making money selling sendmail for idiots to put on NT. There's a difference.

    One's stupidity, the other is taking advantage of other peoples stupidity. Not 100% ethical, but that's capitalism for you.
  • What a dumb thing to do...

    Sendmail... Powerful, flexible and rock solid stability. Then you stick it on NT which has none of these attributes.

    It completely misses the point.
  • Okay, okay, I was being too vague. Understanding of my post depended on familiarity with Tolkien's Ring trilogy. By now you'll have either gotten the joke, or come to the inevitable conclusion that you must read the three Ring books.
  • I normally read with threshold:2 to avoid crappy articles, and I wandered down to threshold:0 to see what I have been missing, particularly on obviously potential anti-MS articles such as this.

    What I see is a bias in the moderation against MS informational and "from the field" articles. Most of the useful articles in this thread should have been 2, informational. Instead they are 1 or 0.

    I know that /. is basically a Linux-against-the-world, a beastary of geeks type of place. And that will be reflected not only in moderation, but also meta-moderation. The problem is that we need to have a better balance, like an "experts in the field" super moderators, who can only bounce articles up to 2 (say) that are truly informational and relevant. To become a super moderator, you would have to apply, and get recognition from people to say that you are one of:

    • wrote the original code
    • administrate lots of users in interesting places
    • I am an active developer of that tool
    • I am Linus

    I'm not just saying this for MS products, I'm saying for everything, whether you happen to be the FreeBSD package master for a product, or a XFree86 developer (like I was), or a kernel developer. We need peer review by qualified individuals. This is not about moderating up trollish opinions, this about moderating up informational articles of any flavour.

    To me, I get value from /. by giving me the devil's advocate view of MS. I work with MS products all the time - I secure and administrate them in very large sites (I'm currently working in one of Australia's largest IT sites with over 30,000 desktops directly affected by my work). I have to have a reality check from time to time, and /. is the right place for that. (rant) With the exception of the week I had off after the truly appalling Richard Stevens incident - I almost didn't come back. Who needs a community that disrepectful of someone who IMHO constitutes a stellar light in a 99.9% dark universe? He did so much for Unix, and my faith in humanity so troubled by /.'s response. (rant finished)

    As you go through life (I'm all of 28, and probably one of the older people here), one of things you should learn is that you have to take into account information from both sides, knowing that some or all of that information is flawed and biased. Then you munge the data and make up your own mind. It'll still come out something like "M$ sux", but hell, you've had a think, and you've made up your own mind. Don't let anyone else do that for you.

  • In my immediate past site (I work at various sites), we had two Exchange bridgeheads distributing large numbers of tasks to 54 sites. Over a million messages a week being sent around the state to manage custom developed software. Beyond hardware failure (can't blame the OS for that one), this worked without a hitch.

    Exchange doesn't BSOD with large number of messages. Exchange is generally not the cause of BSOD's - NT might do so for other reasons (bad RAM, dodgy hardware, the occasional bug check), but I've never seen one caused by Exchange. I've seen Exchange being very sick and AV all over the place, but it doesn't cause NT to crash. It's like saying that sendmail can oops a Linux kernel. Doesn't happen.

    Look through the following two articles for the current cumulative bug fix list for Exchange 5.5 SP3. If anyone can find a single referenced Q article that mentions Exchange code causing a BSOD, I'll donate $AUD20 to Amnesty International. This is not about plain crashes, this about BSOD, which are different beasties altogether.

    Part One [microsoft.com]

    Part Two [microsoft.com]

  • Exim (Score:1)

    by Sesse ( 5616 )
    Yes, Exim is definitely a nice program. Without ever having seen it, I was able to get it up and running (after a short edit of the configuration files) in 5 minutes. Compare that to the time you used on your first sendmail installation (I believe the average there is _well_ over 5 minutes...), add the fact that Exim isn't as widely used (security through obscurity in practice! ;-) ) and you have something that works very well. For anyone struggling with sendmail, Exim might be your program.

    /* Steinar */

  • Re:Exim (Score:1)

    by Sesse ( 5616 )
    Yeah, the docs are very comprehensive. Fortunately, you simply don't need to check them every time you want to do something :-) I think that's the strength of Exim. Sendmail is just complicated without really being logical.

    (There is an INSTALL doc, BTW. I think it tells you everything you need to know.)

    /* Steinar */
  • The worst part of this story for me is the rationalisation for it not being open source - "we can't because we now have other peoples IPR in there" (not that that stopped Netscape - they just removed the proprietary bits and then released the code).

    Having been around the block on companies funded by VC, I can guess how this came about.

    Man in Suit: So, how are we going to convince the stock market we're going to make money eventually?

    Another Man in suit: Easy, port it to NT!

    MIS: What about the Open Source issue?

    AMIS: Easy, bolt some MS code in there and claim you can't release it as it contains IPR we don't own.

    MIS: hur hur hur. Ok, let's do it.

    Depending on how cynical you are, you could see this as checking the burn rate and thinking about the next round of VC funding.

  • If there is to be such a button, it better have a 5-minute limit. Otherwise, Joe Moderator will just moderate, wait until a forum becomes old, and then undo. Heh...

    --

  • That's why we have meta-moderation, no?

    --

  • Sendmail Pro isn't news, of course, but it seems a bit sad, not to mention frustrating, that it came about the way it did.

    The way I was taught in history class, Eric Allman's been the lead maintainer of sendmail for years, and has overseen it through a half dozen or so major redesigns of the config file formats, each more complex than the last, bringing it to where it's been for a while now.

    Now, sendmail.cf is so painful that there are sysadmins who make a living doing nothing but sendmail configs, what with the same file having sections that are space-delimited, and others that are tab-delimited, several macro languages, several variable-assignment syntaxes, and so forth, to the point where one is supposed to write m4 macros to generate these monstrosities.

    I'm not knocking sendmail's flexibility so much as what comes to look like a willful contempt for usability issues, especially when it appears the same folks behind the tangle of sendmail had no problem at all putting a clean, pleasant config toolset together once they decided to make that the distinguishing feature of their commercial version.

    I'm torn on what to think of this. On the basis of the work he's done for years on sendmail, Eric Allman deserves a nice house in the hills, an expensive car, and maybe even a wine cellar and an attentive stockbroker.

    But I can't help but think it might have been more sporting to release even the pretty admin interfaces under the BSD license, and build a business around support, training, certification, professional services, and so forth.

    I wish the guy well, except maybe when I'm busy ripping out my hair wrestling with sendmail configuration.
  • Sure you can run IIS and Exchange on a p120 along with SQL server 6.5 or 7.0. But you can't do that with e-commerse stuff. I have done it for development and what not but you get a few people hitting the system and if the system is actually dynamic (don't even talk if your serving regular html pages because then you have no clue anyway) then the system will not stay up long never mind handle the load. It seams they were using the same server for E-mail, and web serving of e-commerce... good luck on a 120!

    --MD--
  • True; most of CNN is served off of dual-processor Sun boxes (mostly Ultra 60's and 2300's.)

    CNN has a major dependency on ad serving software from Netgravity. Netgravity is not available on Linux or for Apache. (Customers of Netgravity tend to be very large sites that, like CNN, tend to run on commercial UNIX systems.)

    We've been exploring using Linux for systems that don't require Netgravity, but to this point there are only a few production systems running Linux. But it's clearly something we will continue to explore and use where it makes sense.
  • If it weren't for MS, the computing industry wouldn't have grown as fast as it has.

    This assumes that without Micros~1 there would have been a vacuum, which is a fallacy: The computing industry was thriving quite well even outside the (initially) limited world that was Microsoft. If IBM had chosen CP/M instead, you can bet Microsoft would have continued writing software for that platform (which they already did AFAIK), but then they would have been a smaller player, and Digital Research a major one, instead of dwindling down to a bite-size company to be swallowed by whomever (Corel?).

  • It is very hard to configure. Fortunately you can get some basic configuration files for the standard setups and use them-- if you want to do anything fancy, good luck!

    I don't think security is much of a worry in modern sendmail versions. They seem secure, although probably not as secure as qmail or postfix.

  • I think the security issue has been answered.
    Don't run sendmail, or DNS, or libc's from 1985.

    As far as configuration goes, I don't think any of these posters have LOOKED at Sendmail Pro or formerly MetaInfo sendmail (the big deal about this release is that it's more Sendmail Pro than MetaInfo).

    The GUI interface makes much of the m4 stuff go away. If you're still creating config files with vi and editting .CFs, then you really needed to move on 5 year ago into m4 based files (or you've been working with a vendor's mediocre sendmail.)

    In 1993, at a large financial institute, I compiled up OSS sendmail and built 4 config files which ran on 12 OS's and upwards of 1500 machines. If an admin wanted to use, say, SGI's sendmail he could, I just wouldn't help him. Use mine, get support.

    Only one of the 4 config files used more than 20 lines of M4.

    NT Sendmail? Well, OS under it is still going to be a limit. I don't know how much mail you can get through NT's TCP stack before THAT maxes out. I'm pretty confident that it's less than Unix derivatives on the same (or lesser) hardware).

  • I mean, remember when demo versions of Doom were floating around everywhere? For some, the demo was plenty enough game, and for others, they just had to go out and buy Doom after playing the demo. I think the same thing'll happen with Sendmail. Some NT admins'll get exposed to OSS after trying it out and others will just be happy that they can get a real mail program on NT and stick with their NT boxes.

    Which, in the end, is better than not making sendmail for NT at all.
  • Whoops, cross out "OSS" and fill in "Unix"
  • I think Roblimo has a point- Sendmail? NT? But I have to question the approach to this article here on Slashdot- if it isn't newsworthy for CNN, what makes it newsworthy for /.? Besides, the last thing non-AC's such as myself want to read is more 'NT sux, Linux is better'- it's a tired mantra.
    Real news would be 'Exchange counterpart for Unix offered' and don't give me sendmail bs- Exchange is extremely stable when implimented correctly, and can easily house thousands of users- such as I do for a major computer printer manufacturer. sendmail isn't an option for messaging as it does not offer calendaring, resource management (scheduling) task management, or anything close- another reason sendmail for NT is lame- it lacks the features of Exchange. 'Free' is a dead issue, as licensing costs are one of the smallest factors in messaging for >3000 users.

    N_P
  • On Linux, it isn't there yet, but its getting much much better.

    COAS, the Caldera administration utilities, lets you at least change the visible domain, mail relay host, and transport method settings and whether or not the relay is is an Internet or local hub on sendmail. Anything else you need must be manually configured.

    COAS strives to make config files manually editable without the breaking the COAS applets, but I don't really know how good it is with every config file, particularly sendmails since sendmail pretty much works for me out of the box, at least on my home Linux box, which grabs mail from the Internet via ESRs venerable fetchmail program. And I don't use Caldera in a production environment (at least not yet)

    I agree that the port of sendmail is a good thing, even though I don't like the idea that it is closed source. Exchange Server, IMHO, has had too many security holes and it is seriously bloatware (ie it is too big/slow). I prefer implementing Unix or Linux boxen for mail servers, again because of the flexibility of configuration.
  • With 5.5 you can alter folder permissions (and other properties) recursively for a whole branch by checking an option in the Exchange Administrator before you commit your changes. Accomplishing this under 5.0 was rather painful.

    I support Exchange. I hate Exchange. But there is no open source software that can match its capabilities. Believe me, I've tried to put together something of the sort with the Cyrus IMAP server and OpenLDAP. The mail and directory thing is basically doable, but public folders and calendaring present problems. Even if there were a featureful free calendar server available, you'd still need to properly integrate it into the mailstore and get the client software to support it. Permission handling is also kind of messy. I would want to see ACLs on folders managed through the directory.

    We do hand off outgoing mail to Sendmail before it leaves the company, so the MTA thing isn't an issue. I'm tired, though, of people claiming that Sendmail/Qmail/Postfix/etc is a complete replacement for Exchange and Outlook. Maybe if sysadmins were the only people using e-mail, but if that were the case I don't think e-mail would be particularly useful.

    Unfortunately, the degree of integration that this sort of app calls for is currently best handled by a monolithic authority like Microsoft. A lot of standards have to be defined, and getting them all to work together would require a level of unity that the free software community has not exhibited so far. I hope to be proven wrong, of course, so I can get rid of these damn Exchange servers.

    Derek
  • The way i see it, this is kinda terminal for sendmail, or at least should be.
    Going non-open-source about it, having had an OS version for yonx, is such a retrograde step it's unbelievable, if it weren't for the fact that it's on NT.

    Another, closed-source app, running on NT, in direct competition with Exchange? What are they, off their heads?
    They deserve to go under, and we can then get on with using another MTA instead. Good ol' exim...
  • more choice for everyone; you run sendmail on NT, I run it on Linux. You get nice wizards; I get stability.
  • The guy who wrote RFC 821, "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol", is the late Jonathan B. Postel. Eric Allman, the author of Sendmail and partner in Sendmail, Inc., is very much alive and well.

    Do you terribly mind sticking to facts rather than folklore?

    -jhp

  • I was looking into MTA's on linux too and found
    Exim... It seem to work well and was ALOT quicker to set up then sendmail. I did notice a lack of a
    quick and dirty setup doc.
  • I see this as Sendmail, Inc. realizing that their market on Unix systems is starting to evaporate.

    No this is a move to make some money in the enterprise now. Sendmail is doing fine, i use it because i prefer it. As do some use qmail or exim for example.

    Their act is fine. One thing sendmail has going for it is the guy who wrote the RFC for SMTP as developed sendmail. How many Unix admins are going to want to pay for sendmail when they can use a book and some time to figure it out? They know they can make more money going for NT, simple economics. Making blanket and/or inflammatory statements that something is dead or on it's way out because they ported it to NT or you don't like it is foolish.
  • It used to be that Sendmail wasn't secure. That however, was quite a long time ago.
  • first, that should be 'without testing it' in the last sentence.

    thinking on it more, i think nt's problem isn't the myriad ways it can screw up- it's the lack of ability beyond a full reinstall to fix things sometimes.
    Linux can break in so many more ways, it's not even funny. However, you don't have hidden DLLs, cryptic (and undocumented, usually) registry entries, or unknown Microsoft-only APIs that bugger up some other program, and you do have nice lovely text files.
    Which is of course why it's important to install it right the first time it's deployed, not to touch it unless it's necessary, and to test any potential updates on a dupe of the machine.
  • I'm not the expert on the whole incompetence scoop around here (since I'm not one of the 3 roots administering to the unix lab, I don't get in on a lot of the action.. *sniff*) but I know that near (or at, really) the core of the problem is the ITS (information technology services, or some crap like that) head doesn't know what they're doing, and can't understand the wonderful world of *nix.... and doesn't do a darned thing to help out the Unix lab. We are/were supposed to get new HP-UX machines for our unix lab, a better printer, etc., etc... but, _if_ we get anything, it appears we're going to be getting 486's. Goody for us. and a printer that's probably no better than the one we already have (it doesn't work). so, we're SOL. why? b/c we can't do a darned thing to get the ITS head fired, and it doesn't care a darned thing about Unix, or us. so we're screwed. (and that definitely means that they're not off doodling with the Linux kernel).
  • We were setting up an NT laptop to demo against a Samba box last week, and I got so frustrated just watching my boss (who actually works with NT) (my job title is Linux Specialist, I don't have to ever even boot Windows unless StarOffice can't handle the attachment) beat his head against that operating system, I finally told him straight out, "Don't ever make me program on NT. I'll quit."

    Yes.. I know what you mean. (well, in another form, I do)

    At the school I attend, I'd say 95% + of the machines here run WinNT. We have a Unix lab with ~10 old HP-UXs that work just fine.... the only time they've been down was when power was lost (except.. we had to take down the unix lab and relocate it for renovations of the room that housed it.. and two machines got set up, and they've spazzed on us twice, and twice only ... stress, I'm sure... those poor things miss each other's company). We also had 2 486's running Linux.
    However.. the NT machines are the biggest crock of doo this side of forever. (Sadly, I'm on one of them right now). They're down more often than they're up; roaming profiles were enforced, which made login times soar to 9 + minutes; they love "System Process - Low on Virtual Memory" error messages; they like to lose user profiles so that we have to reboot them to login in the first place; the list goes on and on and on.

    My beef is this: who in their right (or left, if you want to get picky) mind is going to set up an NT server for anything?!? Much less and use something that was open-sourced and is designed for the best OSes out there on some piece of crap as crappy as NT? Sheesh!
  • It is interesting to note that afaik, CNN runs their stuff on Sun boxes.
  • Sendmail owns the rights to their program. So they can make changes to the program and license them under something other than the open source license it was initially licensed under.

    They can never deny you the privelage of distributing previous, open-sourced versions, but they can make newer versions closed-source.
  • What a silly gripe. Sendmail is open source
    software. If you want a pretty, useable front
    end to it, write one. All the documentation
    and design details you need to do so are right
    there.


    I don't understand how you can criticize an
    organization simply because they didn't write
    something you want (in this case, a free open
    source Sendmail front end).

  • I am an MCSE. I worked on an Exchange 5.0 upgrade and box migration to 5.5 this summer. The Exchange interface is mediocre at best, and the inability to change folder permissions hierarchically throughout public folders drove me nuts. Public folders kinda bewildered me, as I had to ensure that data's migration to the new box and version, even though no one seemed to have added anything to them recently.

    As I struggled through changing permissions and other Exchange vagaries, I realized a few things (warning blanket generalizations to follow). I am a geek. I hate writing things down. I don't and have not used the scheduling features of Exchange.

    But, a *lot* of people do. Sales and marketing types love contacts folders that the whole department can interact with. Group scheduling, yadda yadda yadda. Messenging systems are not being marketed towards geeks. As a major investment, they need to offer a lot of fricking value to the enterprise as a whole. Thus, these features are becoming mandatory for messenging systems.

    That said, this is why I would love to evaluate OpenMail in the future. An exchange like system runnning on Linux/BSD could be CRITICAL for OSS explosion. Remeber all those MS ads with however many thousands of users running on just one exchange box? Well, we all know that that was an alpha box. Somebody should be creating a migration path for NT Exchange alpha boxes to move to Linux or BSD / Openmail. Anyhow, Exchange like features on Linux is a huge step forward for OSS credibility in the enterprise.

    matt
  • That idiot (Sendmail, Inc.) is making money doing it.
  • I share your viewpoint. I suppose after people see the quality of non-MS software, they cannot help but contemplate that if the MTA is excellent, then the other open source / non-MS /Linux stuff must be pretty good after all.
    The irrestible lure of reducing TCO is a big factor too. (Though some may disagree with me, but the fact is that Linux expertise has grown by leaps and bounds recently, and is readily available. )
  • Why is it good for Linux/BSD? Because it will get people started on using the good Unix utilities on NT. When there's yet another crash on the system, they'll start looking more seriously at moving to Linux/BSD, since the services they're running would be the same. NT5 would be a pointless expense, while Linux/BSD would be nearly free and more stable.
  • Can you imagine how long it would have taken your poor admin to figure out how to configure innd?
  • After the invasion of M$ HQ, we will take all their code (on 2 millioni floppy disks) and melt it once and for all for the good of the OSS community(the world also.)

    And then we could start burning all the books we don't like as well ...
  • That's a good way of generating revenue on open source free software, especially if you have a kick ass one. Port a copy or perhaps a client of it on windows (depends on what the function of the program is) and sell the one on windows and keep that close source.

    It might motivate some people to switch over to linux instead of windows since it's free on linux as well as open source if they want to check out the code. Of course they can see the code on a windows platform and port it over themselves but that'd require programing skills an average user wouldn't have much less would be troubled to.

  • I've done a number of major exchange installs, and what's amusing is the very things you cite as reasons why you wouldn't use sendmail are precisely the same reasons I prefer not to deploy exchange anymore.

    sendmail isn't an option for messaging as it does not offer calendaring, resource management (scheduling) task management, or anything close

    That's my point exactly, when I deploy an enterprise class mail system, I want a mail system that works properly. I really believe that exchange/outlook has suffered from the extreme end of feature creep. I prefer my servers to provide a set of services well, not try to provide everything.

    Don't take this as a flame, since it's always the end user's needs that have to be taken into consideration when evaluating different servers to deploy. And the level of integration from exchange is really unmatched, but I think it's overkill when you need stable messaging.
  • No, actually, the company is one huge international IT department. :) It just happens that PHBs run rampant. Even PHBs, however, can be made to see the light. Usually, it involves ordering a $4,000 compaq server on company money, and then showing him the bill. The bill is cancelled, and you're sailing happily in unix-land. He basically willed the server to run on old retired hardware, and we had machines from last year's co-op students available... I didn't get a choice. I was told "make this do this." Oh. I'm glad it worked in the end, though.

    I'm just convinced now that if you've got perl experience making scripts run on a unix platform, it's just PAINFUL making the scripts work in a windows box. Period. Especially if you have inadequate logging capabilities on that machine. Oh... and having an SMTP daemon which decides to kill itself after being resident for 15 minutes is also a big pain in the patootie.

  • I found out why many large enterprises favor Solaris over other OSes like Linux and *BSD. I don't understand it completely, but from what I remember, Solaris is constantly performing some sort of defragmentation on memory and processes, even when system load and/or memory usage are very low. This affects performance, so you have to run it on beefy hardware.

    I've seen the inside of many Sun boxes; they're impressive. Modular board design; eight or sixteen RAM slots; lock-and-load hard drives that snap in place in a fashion similar to how a ZIF-socket CPU does.

    You pay for this because the boxes are considerably more expensive than, say, a regular x86 box. However, they are much more scalable. And once that system load shoots up to 100%, they stay reliable, because they are forever optimizing memory, processes, etc.

    In addition, Solaris has something called lightweight threads, unlike *BSD (and probably Linux). Instead of forking a new process for every client, which eats up memory unnecessarily, you have fewer processes with each process running a number of lightweight threads. These threads eat up much less memory.

  • silly (Score:1)

    by jmp100 ( 91421 )
    Even Microsoft has a place in this world. If it weren't for MS, the computing industry wouldn't have grown as fast as it has. If they were destroyed, millions of people who either work for them or sell their products worldwide would go unemployed. The economic results would be staggering.

    Every coin has two sides...

  • Let's say your company buys a third-party piece of software for use by the support staff. Then let's say this software requires a hybrid of NT and Unix boxes, taking advantage of both platforms where possible. That's why you would do it. Also, if you hire developers who say that something can be accomplished better with NT (for example, they're designing a program that uses PowerBuilder or any other of the zillions of developer tools available only on the Win9x/NT heirarchy), then guess what, it's going to be done with NT.

    I've worked in shops that used only *nix, in shops that used only NT, and in shops that used a hybrid of them both. Although I prefer *nix, I have to say that NT *does* have its benefits.

  • Actually, since the company that created sendmail is the one selling it, they could do this with GPL'd software as well. As long as they didn't accept patches from other people, or required that the copyright for those patches be signed over to them, they could release a new version not under the GPL, since they own the copyright to the code. The GPL restricts everybody *except* the copyright holder on code - they still retain all the normal rights a copyright holder has.
  • Well, turn it around. The real question is: if you've been told that your server has to be NT, wouldn't you prefer to be running sendmail than IIS?

    Personally, yes, I would, but then again...I'm not the kind of person likely to be setting up an NT mail server.

    I see your point; I guess I'm just kind of wondering aloud why someone would want to go half-way like that. I mean, if you're an all-Microsoft house, I would think you'd be running Exchange, so you can use those nifty proprietary Exchange features.

    Otherwise, I would think someone who is already thinking down the lines of not tying themselves exclusivly to Microsoft solutions, if they wanted to use sendmail, would just set themselves up a UNIXy box of some sort.

    But, you're right...if they do set up sendmail on their NT box, that's still a Good Thing(tm), because it means that normal mail programs (including those that run on non-Microsoft operating systems) can be used on the clients.

    --
    Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page [slappy.org]

  • I think the real question this article raises is...if you're setting up a mail server, and you've chosen sendmail as your MTA, why in the heck would you want to run it on NT?

    Well, turn it around. The real question is: if you've been told that your server has to be NT, wouldn't you prefer to be running sendmail than IIS?

    The sad truth, as some of us are all too aware, is that technical considerations don't always guide the purchasing decisions. There's still a big high-level push to use Microsoft products in many places. Being able to use sendmail, with all the support and testing that it's gone through, very likely makes an NT mailserver that much more stable.

  • Lately, moderators are scoring things down simply because they disagree with it.


    Usually its good to have discussion and diverse viewpoints. I lately seen a rash of moderation that wants to discriminate and squelch anything they can. This is a discussion forum, not a written essay exam. Lets encourage, not step on toes. Yet, they are strict. Hostile.

    I have seen many hostile moderators that seem to be carrying a bat marking anything they can redundant or flaimbait. They must be new, or just troll moderators. Perhaps there are too many posts and people are getting fustrated, but I am seeing much abuse.
  • After the invasion of M$ HQ, we will take all their code (on 2 millioni floppy disks) and melt it once and for all for the good of the OSS community(the world also.)

    Well, don't forget that you'll have to carry all of that to Mt. St. Helens, as it's the nearest convenient volcano.

  • I see this as Sendmail, Inc. realizing that their market on Unix systems is starting to evaporate. These days, many admins are realizing that there are much better alternatives to sendmail (like exim, postfix, qmail), and happily, most of these are under good, open source licenses.

    Sendmail needs to get their act together and remove years of cruft, or they'll soon find themselves welcome only on WinNT.

    --
    Ian Peters
  • It is their source - they can't get back what is already "out there" but they can do what they like to anything new. Acutally, their license is a bit {unique,wierd} in that it lets it be distributed as "Open Source" or as binary only - but it stipulates that binary only distributions must be freeware. All the other restrictions are more BSD than GPL.
    AdamT (IANAL)

  • It's easy for the Unix advocate to wonder why the hell open source projects are porting to NT. I've often asked myself this question and I've come up with one answer: To get them to quit using NT.

    Sendmail is a perfect example. Once an IS manager uses sendmail and discovers just how versatile and superior it is over Microsoft's product, they'll be ecstatic- especially since the cost of ownership is probably a ridiculous difference.

    But after a while, the IS guy is going to notice that inherent problems with NT itself are really bothering him. Since he doesn't have Microsoft products keeping him bound to NT, he can then move to a much-more-stable platform like Linux and stick with what he knows: Sendmail.

    The great thing about this is that the Microsoft fans probably think open source projects porting to NT is some kind of validation of NT as a viable computing platform. Heh heh.

    *ROTFLMAO*

  • This could well be a blow to Linux's increasing popularity as it addresses some fundamental concerns about NT.

    No, It's a blow to NT - it will forstall the potential deployment of a bastardized, not-quite-standard Microsoft imitation of sendmail. It will also drive home the point to many a PHB that you can get sendmail on NT, but not for free. On Linux it's free. Contrary to popular belief, such things do matter to PHB's. [

  • Why is it good for NT? Because it allows for the migration of people used to using Sendmail on Linux. When there's yet another security breach on the system, they'll start looking more seriously at moving to NT, since the services they're running would be the same. NT5 would be a justifiable expense, while Linux would continue to prove the adage "You get what you pay for."

    :-)

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • ...Hard to Configure: Sendmail was designed and built in an era when the extra code to make for user-friendly configuration by '90s standards would have chewed up more resources than it was worth. Heck, 18 years ago the fact that you were able to configure the program using a file instead of recompiling it was user-friendly. (Or at least administrator-friendly.) Sendmail remains difficult for novices to configure because it's a very powerful, flexible program. If you want to do something meaningful with it, you've got to develop a solid knowledge of how things work or you're going to fall flat on your face. These days I consider that a feature in that it keeps people who really shouldn't be fooling around with MTAs from doing it. That may sound like an elitist attitude, but if the Visual BASIC set were able to field Sendmail configurations for their companies, they'd be the first ones crying foul and filing lawsuits when they shot themselves in the feet.

    ...Back Doors: Yes, Rob Morris got his worm in through a bug in Sendmail, but he did so a decade ago when people who used the Internet were a bit more trustworthy on the whole than they are today. That one incident prety well started the trend toward making sure programs didn't have any bugs that could be exploited and turned into a security problem. Sendmail itself has no designed-in "back doors," although I figure that like most other software, the odd security-related bug will pop up from time to tome and be promptly squashed. One of the reasons Sendmail is so secure and stable is that it's had plenty of time to mature. That same bit of code that reads the configuration files you're complaining about has been exercised millions of times at thousands of sites, and by God it works! Sendmail is indeed flexible enough to be configured in an insecure way, but not doing so is part of knowing what you're doing. If you're dumb enough to configure /bin/sh as a mailer, well, c'est la vie.

    Whatever the case, though, Allman and his friends at Sendmail, Inc. are doing exactly what companies who use the open source model should be doing: they're adding some real value, not just repackaging it. Besides, after all the hard work he's done on Sendmail, I'd say he deserves to make a buck on it.

  • You don't seem to know what Public Folders are about. Public Folders are kind of like usenet, in that it is a distributed database of replicas. If you introduce a new message into one replica, the servers will replicate that message to other replicas. The major feature that Exchange Public Folders has over usenet and other systems is that you can create replicas based on topology and clients will automatically be directed to the replica closest to them. They don't need to know or care which server has the replica.

    Oh, and Exchange integrates Public Folders with its support of NNTP, so that you can access Public Folders via NNTP as well as with an Outlook client.
  • Argh... I was working on an order desk server this summer at my job. We originally started off running IIS on... get this.... a P120. Yes, that's for a dynamic realtime ordering and electronic delivery server. AUGH!It was terrible. After performance issues and delivery problems, we eventually installed win 95 and Apache. (No, I was under orders. Augh. It was gross.) From there, I finally got it over to an unix box. One of my biggest complaints was that win32 sendmail, in it's various implementations was one of two things. a) Faulty or b)expensive. One option we tried was both. It was funny... after working for months trying to get everything to work seamlessly on windows, we gave up and brought one of those old HP-UX boxes out of retirement... and we were in full operation in 6 hours. Yes, *6.* I was kicking myself. I got three days off.
  • Because you already have a slew of NT machines, and everyone in IT is trained in how to use them. You can migrate to Linux, but that costs lots of time and money. Even though Linux itself is free, it requires a real investment to get people trained on it.

  • Re:secure?? (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 25, 1999 @11:15AM (#1660150)
    If sendmail adds security, exactly how bad is Exchange Server??
    Just like the rest of NT, I should think.

    That is, truly abysmal.

    We were setting up an NT laptop to demo against a Samba box last week, and I got so frustrated just watching my boss (who actually works with NT) (my job title is Linux Specialist, I don't have to ever even boot Windows unless StarOffice can't handle the attachment) beat his head against that operating system, I finally told him straight out, "Don't ever make me program on NT. I'll quit."

    I should think this is actually less a migration tool from *nix to NT and more in the other (better) direction. After all, replace Exchange with Sendmail, IIS with Apache, Office with StarOffice, and you may as well replace what's underneath it with something lighter, faster, and stronger...

    As for sendmail being full of holes, it was my understanding that most things post-8.8 were pretty well fixed, with the usual turnaround time (sub-24 hours) on anything new...

  • LinuxWorld article.. (Score:3)

    by Mike Hicks ( 244 ) <hick0088@tc.umn.edu> on Saturday September 25, 1999 @10:44AM (#1660151) Homepage Journal
    I still think it's odd that CNN would have an article about sendmail.

    Umm.. that's because it's a reprinted article from LinuxWorld [linuxworld.com]. CNN reprints a lot of stuff that comes from IDG magazines..
  • The unusual thing is that sendmail for NT is not open source.

    It's not really odd; they've been advertising their closed-source Sendmail Pro thing for some time here on Slashdot.

    Of course, the only reason anyone would need Sendmail Pro is because of the sheer user hostility of sendmail.cf and friends. Keep that bat book handy.

    I've switched all my machines over to Exim [exim.org]. Nice configuration files, and licensed under the GPL.

    I think the real question this article raises is...if you're setting up a mail server, and you've chosen sendmail as your MTA, why in the heck would you want to run it on NT?

    --
    Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page [slappy.org]

  • Moderation: sometimes it's an accident (Score:3)

    by SurfsUp ( 11523 ) on Saturday September 25, 1999 @05:17PM (#1660153)
    I'd just like to draw attention to one problem with the current moderation forms. In flat mode, you select a moderation action from the list (+1/-1, comment) then you scroll down to read the next article. Unfortunately, the text focus stays in the selection list (BAD DESIGN, netscape). You hit an arrow key, the screen doesn't move, so instead you use the mouse or whatever. In the meantime, you just changed your moderation selection - it's way off screen, so you don't notice it until you hit the "moderation" button at the bottom of the screen. Then you see this nice little list of moderation actions you did, some of which you never intended, with no way to undo it. ****There has to be an "undo-moderation" button****. This is a very frustrating user-interface issue.

  • BSOD for Sendmail! :) (Score:3)

    by Admiral Burrito ( 11807 ) on Saturday September 25, 1999 @12:39PM (#1660154)

    <Obligatory NT whipping>

    Why should Exchange users be the only ones to enjoy the pretty blue user interface? Now even Sendmail admins can benefit from revolutionary new error messages!

    The BSOD was the only thing missing from Unix sendmail. Well, that and a Navajo code talker to translate the .cf files.

    You have new mail. You will have to restart your computer for this change to take effect.

    </Obligatory NT whipping>

  • Apples and oranges. (Score:3)

    by IIH ( 33751 ) on Saturday September 25, 1999 @02:33PM (#1660155)
    Sendmail and Exchange can't really be compared directly as they fulfill different needs. Sendmail is a MTA, Exchange is much more. The functions that sendmail provide are covered by one section of exchange. It's the Internet mail server (or connector) and not the Exchange MTA that's the parallel for those that are curious)

    IMO, as an MTA, Sendmail wins hands down, for several reasons, being better at anti-spam, and general potential configurabiliy. Exchange however, would win on ease of configurability. (I'm not including sendmail pro, which I have no experience of, just sendmail via M4 and the cf file.)

    Interestingly, this is almost typical of my experiences of MS vs opensource projects, the MS one is easier to configure, even if the OSS is more powerful overall.

    Back to the topic, I've used and configured Sendmail, (right down to the cf file level when it wasn't doing stuff correctly). I've used exchange from 4.0 to 5.5. Both seem to be fine for thier respective purposes, albeit with a little work on both sides.
    --

  • No, Good Strategy (Score:3)

    by tqbf ( 59350 ) on Saturday September 25, 1999 @12:20PM (#1660156) Homepage
    I think this is an excellent move on Sendmail's
    part, and one that other vendors might do well
    to mimic.


    First, from an "ethical" perspective: NT is a
    closed-source proprietary operating system. The
    expectation that you'll get quality open-source
    apps on NT is and should be unrealistic. It is
    easier to create open-source software in an open
    environment, and that's exactly what Linux and
    BSD provides.


    Moreover, because of the closed nature of NT, it
    is more of an investment to get software working
    "natively" on NT than under Linux (where almost
    any task you'd want to do has been done and a
    high-quality example has been published). Sendmail
    is just "protecting their investment", an action
    necessitated by Microsoft's strategy of using
    closed proprietary APIs. Another reason for IT
    people NOT to lock themselves into Microsoft's
    proprietary solutions.


    Now, from a business perspective: Win32 is where
    the money is right now. If Sendmail can pick up
    good revenue from selling their product closed
    under NT, they'll have less incentive to keep
    their extensions closed under Linux. This may
    be the best of both worlds --- they can keep the
    goodwill of the Linux community by distributing
    open software there, but make money by charging
    people to use it under NT.


    It seems like an interesting alternative open-
    source business model to me. Why haven't more
    people discussed this as a way of making money
    off open source development?

  • If you really want unix got out and get it. (Score:3)

    by asad ( 65703 ) on Saturday September 25, 1999 @10:32AM (#1660157)
    I think lately people have begun to realize that Perl and Sendmail and co are superior to their counterparts on NT so instead of learning Unix/Linux and actually getting the "real" thing they ask for an NT version. IMO this doesn't fix the problem it simply maskes it. You will still have all the problems you normally have with an NT mailer. Just because it's sendmail it doesn't mean that it will magically fix everything that's wrong with NT.

  • secure?? (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 25, 1999 @10:18AM (#1660158)
    If sendmail adds security, exactly how bad is Exchange Server??

  • Re:How can it not be Open Source? (Score:4)

    by _dim ( 15419 ) on Saturday September 25, 1999 @11:00AM (#1660159)
    This is because sendmail's license [sendmail.org] is based upon the BSD license. It specifically allows software to become closed.

    I don't want to start a GPL vs BSD flame war here, but this is a good example of the possibilities of the BSD license.
    --

  • Not that odd (Score:4)

    by rde ( 17364 ) on Saturday September 25, 1999 @10:16AM (#1660160)
    For a start, it's not a Sendmail story; it's an NT story. More specifically, it's a Unix Flagship App being Made Available for NT story. For me, the relevant paragraph cites Sendmail as making NT "more scaleable and more secure". This is a big thing (as we all know), and a factor that may weigh heavily in the minds of NT admins considering migration.
    Which means there'll probably be a slew of 'traitor', 'sell-out', etc aimed at Sendmail, all of which cheerfully ignore the reality of business; companies are around to make money and the best way of doing that is to have your software work on as many machines as possible.
    This could well be a blow to Linux's increasing popularity as it addresses some fundamental concerns about NT. But that's no reason to blame Sendmail.

  • Re:secure?? (Score:5)

    by IntlHarvester ( 11985 ) on Saturday September 25, 1999 @01:38PM (#1660161) Journal
    (Since everyone is making comparisons, and this one is the highest rated.)

    Just to point something out, sendmail and Exchange aren't really comparable products. Sendmail is pretty much a pure SMTP MTA, where Exchange tries to be a complete groupware system, with X400-based mail.

    I guess you could make a comparision between sendmail and the rather non-configurable Exchange Internet Mail Connector or with the simple IIS SMTP relay, but that's not really fair either. Most larger shops will use something like sendmail on the border or the backbone with Exchange or whatever else for internal mail only. Sendmail for NT makes sense even in Exchange enviorns because Microsoft really doesn't make a good straight-SMTP solution.

  • Used Sendmail on NT - Loved Sendmail on NT (Score:5)

    by millia ( 35740 ) on Saturday September 25, 1999 @11:22AM (#1660162) Homepage
    For me, the great benefit of Sendmail on NT (and while is this strictly speaking from experience with the MetaInfo owned version, after trying out 3.0 at Networld it appears to be just as valid) was twofold:
    1) it just works. period. At a previous job, we had to use NT because of a state project, and I didn't want to have exchange doing direct mail transfers. So, we got SendMail/NT, and it works like a champ. As a gateway, it's unbeatable.
    The new version is even nicer, and it fixes a lot of the inabilities of 2.5 to customize setups.
    Frankly, I don't understand the person who talked about its instability- ours was on a pII/350 (256 megs ram, 8 gigs hd) that was running IIS and Proxy 2, and that was a box that never hiccuped*. At last check, there were over 4 gigs of mail sent and 11 gigs of mail received on that box, with but 2 messages hiccuping. It doesn't interfere with other services, and it starts and stops quickly.
    Now, I don't really know about its robustness for POP purposes. We didn't use it that way. The only account was mine for mail list reading. I have heard that the new version makes performance quite effective, as the previous one did apparently suffer with more than 500 pop accounts.
    2) It finances sendmail's continued existence. When they bought out MetaInfo's product, Sendmail Inc. raised prices and removed the unlimited POP option, causing some grumbling. Before, it cost $250 for schools, with unlimited users. Still, for nonprofits, it's still a bargain (if you have to use NT), and the effective cost per user is less than exchange's.

    *The big problem with NT is the myriad ways that it can screw up. But at root I think is people who think that making a production NT server requires less planning than a *nix box.
    I wouldn't dream of taking a by-the-server-wizard installation of Redhat directly to use, and similarly, it's foolish to expect the same of NT in spite of Microsoft's portrayal. Plus, the other things that get added (like HP's print tools) can complicate matters unnecessarily.
    Nor would I put it in use with testing it, and then rebuilding it from scratch, if it was my first such setup.

  • Server Administration (Score:5)

    by HalJohnson ( 86701 ) on Saturday September 25, 1999 @10:24AM (#1660163) Homepage
    I've deployed quite a few NT servers, but these days, I'm finding unix boxen more and more appealing. Unlike most people who gripe about the stability of NT, this isn't my issue. I have NT servers that have been running for well over a year without a hitch. My newfound preference for unix is due to flexibility. Configuring NT services is nowhere near as flexible as configuring comparable unix services, not without getting into some real code anyhow.

    It's interesting how they point out the easy to use UI for configuring sendmail on NT. Although the primary reason I like unix is due to the power available by modifying configuration files to taste, I still think there should be two levels of configuration for any particular service.

    Even if the second level is just a "browser" to give you an overview of the current setup, it would be a welcome addition. Sometimes its aggrevating to scroll through huge config files just to find one particular setting. I wouldn't give up the slightest bit of flexibility for it, but it would be nice.

    I personally consider the port of sendmail a good thing. Exchange has some nice features, but it's a serious dog. And I've had the unfortunate experience of developing exchange/outlook commercial plug-ins on both the client and server side. It wasn't as bad as notes/vim, but it was close.

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