Author: Jim Cheetham Date: To: exim-users Subject: [Exim] Re: What do you want in a book?
In common with many people here, I also maintain a library of useful
books, all of which have been read almost cover-to-cover. Half of these
are put aside, but the other half are often used.
There are two types of book in my often-used category, and I would hope
that the Exim book would fall into one of these ...
Some books contain arcana that I don't use often enough to remember,
occasionally simple stuff (what does the dns book say about SOA hostname
records, for example[*]).
Some books I keep on lending out to newbies of varying degrees with the
comment "Read the introductory chapters, then ask your question again".
The best books fall into both categories - the only downside is that I
have to keep on prowling through the offices looking for them :-)
I would expect a "timeless" philosophy/introductory section to be no more
than one third of the volume, i.e. define the scope of the software,
define and point to RFCs for the terms that are going to be used, and
discuss two or three examples of configuration/usage. (I would choose
"company mailhub, processing all incoming mail and delivering most to
local users", "end-user mailhub, sending all outgoing mail to central
server (company mailhub or dialup ISP) and delivering to a couple of
local users", and "secondary MX with as little configuration as possible
(deliver all to some primary machine, but still not open relay)" )
Then a "build a config from scratch" section discussing the major config
options, similar to the documentation but taking a different route through
what's available
Finally, any stuff that needs to be talked about, including issues that
will be causing change to the software, and possibly the wish list. (One
of the best parts of, for example, the MySQL ora book is the "what MySQL
lacks" chapter, because it tells you what might have already been fixed by
the developers)
Possibly a quick discussion/rant on non-RFC compliant mailers would be
useful for those of us who have to co-exist with M$ and other legacy
systems ... :-)
As for reading "anything" with exim in it, if Neal Stephenson had been
aware of it in _Cryptonomicon_, any ideas what it would have been called?
We had "Finux" for "Finnish Unix" aka Linux, would we have had "Camta" for
"Cambridge MTA" ?
[*] DNS book says that the SOA hostname field is purely for human
consumption, but the Italian registry nic.it demands that it be the same
as the primary NS. How about that ... :-) I didn't think I'd configured my
DNS records invalid by default ...
