Re: [Exim] Web based admin

Hello Yann,

> While it is possible to do a simple admin tool that will set options and
> the like, the real power of Exim comes from its versatility. You can
> create your own routers, directors and transports to do the things that
> *you* need to do. It is the creation of your own regular expressions and
> databases lookups, your own blackhole, your own whatever that makes Exim
> powerfull.

First, since every other popular MTA has much of the same functionality,
and have tools to assist in their management, there is no reason not to
create ones for Exim. Yes, there are many things that a web gui probably
cannot do easily, but hey, a gui tool is not neccessarily supposed to do
everything. Much/most of what a common < 1000 user mail system can be
done via a gui tool. Besides, you can always hand edit the config.

Also, a gui admin tool is not neccessarily used for just configuration.

> There is *NO* web tool that would be usefull for that. None whatsoever.
> It's just not possible to code one that would allow you to do a tenth of
> what ``vi /etc/exim_conf'' allows you to do.

So much blah blah blah. Listen, maybe you stick to vi, and let others try
and make exim more tolerable for the average joe. Why waste time trying
to convince others not make Exim administration more average-joe friendly,
and help them automate certain tasks? How about you take two guesses why
Exim is not more popular with Un*x distributions???

> What is usefull and you can do is a reporting system that will tell
> managers states about their system. Think MRTG, but with mail info like
> CPU usage, memory, disk IO, spool size, frozen messages, number of
> processes, etc... Now that's usefull and pretty. Hell, you can even do
> some states on the log files like Existat and present it in a nice web
> form. That would be very usefull.

Very nice, I'll start with the basics and keep to a more admin focused
direction vs. monitoring. Another good metric is time in queue BTW.

> Oh, if you choose to do that, please
> do not write it in some scripting language (perl, python, sh, tcl...) as
> they will hit the system too hard to get anything of value and they will
> be slow as hell. C is the ideal choice there.

Well, I have chosen to work with webmin, so perl it will be. Plus, to be
honest, if you are a *good* perl programmer, your perl is quite fast.

How much time do you spend managing your exim installation? I mean come
on, even on a big site ( ~2mil msgs per hour ) you don't spend that much
time using an admin tool.

Realtime monitoring tools are a separate item to me, and those often must
be written to be very scaleable and probably best in c/c++, especially if
you have lots and lots of data from many sources.

Best,


Richard F. Rebel

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