SMTP section - RFC on moving sendmail to 201

[sdaugherty]

I'd like to suggest moving sendmail to 201 - it's overly complex for the "junior" sysadmin by modern standards, and horribly inappropriate for most modern mail configurations due to it's complexity, security history, and large amount of poorly understood legacy features for mail setups that largely don't exist anymore, like uucp routing.

With that done, I'd like to either put exim in its place, or leave postfix alone in 101.

Thoughts?

[miketheman]

Sendmail was the really baseline mailer before postfix usurped its dominance, and postfix even provides a bunch of sendmail aliases.

Consider maybe simplifying SMTP 101 to deal with the protocol, more theory, and move all daemon-related topics into 201?

[alexjs]

I think it'd make more sense to keep SMTP101 at the protocol level and push daemon related into 201. I'll start to draft this out now and submit it for review.

[jsleeio]

Mostly disagree. Love it or loathe it, it's the gold standard mailer. Sure, move it to 201, but please at least do so for current, still-factual reasons. Other points:

• The severe security issues are a bygone era - it has much the same privilege separation as Postfix, and has had for an awfully long time
• M4 configuration. It's been there a long, long time. It keeps things simple. Yes, M4's a bit icky, but most of the real configuration is outside M4 in the various tables

Truly, I find it no more difficult to configure than Postfix. The steps are vaguely as follows

1. set mail default route (smarthost) if required (sendmail.mc)
2. enable any required tables (virtuser, generics, domain, access, etc) (sendmail.mc)
3. fill in the tables with suitable data (tables files in /etc/mail/)
4. make -C /etc/mail
5. /etc/init.d/sendmail start (on modern RHEL this does the 'make' for you!)
6. test as appropriate

I don't think this is really very different to Postfix. No admin who has developed the RTFM proficiency should struggle with either of them. And Sendmail is IMHO very well documented.

For the overwhelming majority of servers I operate, Sendmail config is limited to setting SMART_HOST in sendmail.mc. That's it. For the smarthosts I might enable masquerading and add a line or two to the access table, but none of that is rocket surgery.

[alexjs]

So I think we're agreed that sendmail definitely has a place in here - as do exim and postfix (as you're likely to encounter all of them and have to posses a reasonable awareness of them).

Are we also agreed with a layout of:

101 -> Protocol, history, telnet usage, similar
201 -> Common daemons, common configurations

?

[miketheman]

@alexjs - thanks for distilling that down.
@indigoid - thanks for the examples - maybe you'd like to contribute by writing in some examples of configurations?

@sdaugherty - you raised this issue - does the split make sense?

[jsleeio]

@miketheman Happy to do so. Should I wait for folks to do the splitting/rearranging first? I have a few other curriculum things on the bubble :-)

[miketheman]

@alexjs would you be open to reworking the topic based on that suggestion?

@indigoid if you add the info to sections in the 201 topic, then it should be easy to rearrange where necessary.

[alexjs]

@miketheman Absolutely - sounds good, just priority juggling on my end. Should be able to look at this next week, if anyone gets there first, go ahead. :)

[miketheman]

Bump.

[jsleeio]

Sorry guys I have been distracted from curriculum for a while. Will be back on the wagon soon!

Related note: I had to configure Sendmail on HP-UX recently. They managed to take a simple process and make it horribly, unnecessarily difficult and broken. I am so, SO glad that that shitty OS is dying a horrible death of irrelevancy in almost all market sectors

[nibalizer]

@indigoid while you're there do you think you could email me the output of cat /proc/cpuinfo on hpux? Someone on the Puppet dev list requested it. Thanks.