[PLUG-TALK] Is it just me, or...

[Michael C. Robinson]

On Mon, 2003-09-15 at 19:29, Russ Johnson wrote:
> On 15 Sep 2003 15:52:11 -0700
> "Michael C. Robinson" <michael at goose.robinson-west.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> I quit using sendmail many years ago, because it's too unwieldy to configure. Some also say it's too laiden with security flaws. 
> 
I use postfix, which on my system was literally a drop in replacement for sendmail. Most of the hash tables convert cleanly. The config file in postfix makes sense, 
and telling it to do this thing that you want is as simply as adding a line to the config file, and restarting postfix. With sendmail, you have to add it to the config 
file, compile the config file, then restart the process.
 
I ran into trouble on the Postfix mailing lists with list ire...  

I'm not up enough on Postfix at the moment.  I tried qmail, 
kept configuring it wrong though which really makes a mess.
I wonder if Mr. Sawicki has finished his book on Postfix?
I've tried Postfix, I thought it was harder to get started
with though than qmail.  I kept getting mail loops back 
to itself problems, etc., with Postfix when I last tried 
it.  There was a lot in the config file that didn't
make sense and who knows if options were missing from
it that needed to be added for my environment.  I'd
like a definitive reference for that config file though
I wonder if I have enough background to understand
just a reference as opposed to an in depth guide.

Somebody should write a helper program like the kernel's 
menuconfig for compiling and configuring Postfix, if I 
knew how to write such a script I wonder what that would 
involve?  Since I'm looking at using Postfix source, is 
there any special way I should compile it?  Can I add 
Postfix to a system running sendmail in parallel, then 
shut down sendmail as soon as I get Postfix configured 
correctly to take over?  How can I test Postfix's
configuration without interrupting Sendmail while
I fuss?

I used m4 to configure sendmail, I didn't hand edit the
sendmail.cf config file too much.

For now I am using the newest version of sendmail from
when I installed it.  I used source code from 
sendmail.org enabling run as a non root user 
and use smrsh.  The latter is a restricted shell.

My original plan is, put Postfix on web.robinson-west.com
and xerxes.robinson-west.com, (the outside addresses.)
This way I can have sendmail internally, compatible with
practically everything, yet have Postfix handling first 
exposure and most likely all the filtering.

This would mean filtering on my gateways and I guess setting
these gateways up as relays.  My mail server is on a private
lan with only port 25 forwarded to it from the outside world
offering it some protection.  I figure the gateways ought to
be secondary exchangers though I am uncertain if this is
the right terminology for them since I want outside messages 
to go to them first only to be delivered after being filtered
and deemed safe to my hub.  Essentially, I want to setup a
secondary mail sites on my gateways and reconfigure sendmail
to set the return address to these secondary mail sites,
assumes that's the correct approach.  Perhaps another approach
is to program my hub to use the gateways as relays to send
messages to when sending outside my network.

     --  Michael