Quoth Richard rebel on Fri, Sep 07, 2001 at 02:36:56PM +0000
> > 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?
<Flame war alert> 'nuff said.
> How about you take two guesses why Exim is not more popular with Un*x
> distributions???
FreeBSD nearly used Exim as its main MTA but couldn't because of the
lisence? ... or was it Red Hat? Phil?
> > 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.
Time in queue is not somethng mrtg can do easily. You have to either
ripe log files for that (which is slow) or you can open all the files in
the spool and read those. Both are going to hit your file system...
Besides, 99% of messages will be delivered right away.
> 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.
Quite fast is not good enough. The problem I had was that it sometimes
took the perl script more than 5 mins to go throught the spool and I
wanted the states spaced in 5 mins interval. It wasn't up to the job,
and I am a good programmer... ;>
> 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.
I managed the biggest mail system in Europe for two years. We had tool
to monitor it (written in C) and tool to admin it (generally shell
scripts calling exim -options | awk). It was a 50 hours a week job,
sometimes more... and a web interface would have made it worst. I
needed speed, not pretty pictures.
But you mileage may (and does) vary.
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