Sendmail and Majordomo?

A new start also offers new possibilities ...

There are a few things in BlueOnyx which are just there because ... they've always been. Not because we like them particularly much. Or because we think they're great.

Having said that and by looking at the subject here you can already guess where this is leading.

Our daemons and essential services are currently:

• Apache & AdmServ
• Sendmail with SMTP-Auth
• Proftpd
• Dovecot
• MySQLd
• SSHd
• SNMPd (optional)
• Telnetd (optional and not recommended to run)
• Majordomo
• Poprelayd (for those who can't use SMTP-Auth)

Now there is almost nothing wrong with most of those. Personally I like vsftpd much more than ProFTPd and I may have often cursed Dovecot for not implementing means to detect or block brute force attacks on the daemon level. But they're fine.

But we all know:

Majordomo is a mess.

It is crap. Even crappier than crap. The only reason we still have it, is because we always did - even back on the Cobalt RaQs. This time around there may be the chance to replace it with Mailman, although it will be a strech to adapt the GUI for it. Even more so to make it possible to CMU-Export a Majordomo mailing list and to CMU-import it into a Mailman mailing list.

So let us not make any promises in that regards, but yes: Ideally we will replace Majordomo with Mailman for BlueOnyx 5107R and 5108R.

Sendmail? Yeah, it does that ...

Yeah, Sendmail is another hot topic. Hey, it is an industry standard and has been around for so long, that it really shows. Doesn't it?

We all probably have gone through nightmares with m4 macros while editing sendmail.mc and sendmail.cf and just wished that the bloody thing would do what it was supposed to do.

So yes: BlueOnyx 5107R and 5108R will have Postfix instead of Sendmail, because if we don't make that change now, it'll never happen until CentOS-7.0.

Thankfully Hisao Shibuya already submitted Postfix aware code to the BlueQuartz 5200R SVN repository and as we tend to borrow code from each others we borrowed some of that as well.

As it is right now the module base-email.mod on 5107R is very experimental in its Postfix-awareness and will have to see plenty of changes until it does all the things that we want it to do. But eventually we'll get there.