On Mon, Sep 10, 2001 at 09:49:22AM +0000, Patrick wrote:
> Dr Andrew C Aitchison <Mon, Sep 10, 2001 at 09:13:49AM +0100>:
> >A comprehensive gui to support the full flexibility of the exim
> >configuration file is going to require significant maintenance.
> >Since most users are going to want access to the documentation
> >for each feature, there will have to be lots of cross references
> >to the manual.
This would indeed seem a sensible way to do it, and you'd probably need
to name all the features in the gui after the features in the config file.
> There seems to be an ongoing confusion in this thread about what Webmin
> and Linuxconf is for.
If you are using either of these for a server machine then you are either
completely insane or completely stupid. If you are using them for a
workstation, you should almost certainly be smarthosting anyway, in which
case the exim-conf utility can build this for you trivially.
> Webmin makes an entire system manageable for a non-technical user. If
I hate to make this point, but mail is *extremely* technical. Getting
correct mail delivery is certainly easy to get wrong. Things like reliable
delivery, anti-spam prevention, understanding of relay issues etc can not
trivially be done by people who are running a mail server "as a non-tech"
user, and on the side of some other job. If they want to have mail, then
they should be paying an ISP or someone to do it for them. I know that this
is an extremist view, however there are so many broken mail systems on the
internet today that they are actually swamping out the correctly run ones.
> it included all the options for all the packages, it would be
> incomprehensible to a non-technical user and therefore useless.
I'm sorry, mail delivery is a HARD problem. Especially for anything
non-trivial, such as my mail configuration, which involves 3 SMTP listeners,
virtual domains, with different behaviours, several classes of forward files,
TLS (with relaying), mailing lists (out of the virtual domains), delivering
to an IMAPd. This is not *that* unusual, I'm only one person with one box...
Anybody who is configuring mail to do anything more complicated than pointing
at a smarthost should not be using any kind of gui.
> A GUI to setup a complex mail environment is a different project. I
> have no doubt that it would be a fine project for someone who's problem
> it is aimed at. But my original post was aimed at at a Webmin module or
> Linuxconf module that allows someone who to manage their users without
> ever needing to find out that SMTP exists let alone what the letters
> stand for.
Bring on the open relays. Bring on the machines that silently drop mail.
If that's what you want, but invariably users will want more, the ability,
for example, to set up aliases. Also more and more companies are buying up
variants of their domain names, and they may be mail serving for other
people...
Personally, as I say, I think anything more complicated than setting up a
server to smarthost to for this kind of config, and you're either insane or
unaware of the problems.
MBM (apologies for the nature of this post, but this is something I feel
very strongly about)
--
Matthew Byng-Maddick <mbm@???> http://colondot.net/
