On Mon, Sep 10, 2001 at 11:27:20AM +0000, patrick@??? wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 10, 2001 at 10:23:31AM +0100, Matthew Byng-Maddick wrote:
> >completely insane or completely stupid. If you are using them for a
> >workstation, you should almost certainly be smarthosting anyway, in which
> It is worth taking a deep breath and taking time to think before
> labelling your peers as insane and stupid. In my experience, people on
I've thought long and hard about this before, and every time I've come to
the same conclusion.
I'm only labelling people who think that having a simplified interface to
try and let them administer a complex system they don't understand or want
to understand.
After all, anyone can be an NT admin, because it's just Windows.
> this list appear neither insane nor stupid. Before labelling people in
> this way, why not take a second to think about the possibility that
> other people may have experience and intelligence equal to your own and
> yet have different views? It does happen that way sometimes.
Yes. However in this situation I think that people are missing the point.
You are certainly missing mine.
> >I hate to make this point, but mail is *extremely* technical. Getting
> Mail is just another application. Exim is just another mail server. It
The second sentence is correct. However, you may want to take the time to
consider the difference between a mail server and an MTA (and yes, they are
different, I don't care if most things that do the latter job also do the
former, but they are different services). The first is not. In my reasonably
limited experience with UNIX, there is no such thing as "just another
application". If that is really what you think, can I recommend MS Exchange?
Mail delivery is inherently extremely complex. All of the queueing, spooling
and the SMTP in-step transaction are the way they are for a reason, if you
don't even try to understand it, should you be a mail admin? Personally, I
think not. If you try to be a kind of "fair-weather" mailadmin, then you are
going to have problems when some of the obscure failure modes happen (and
there are a few of these). Do you know about all of the different relay
modes for a mailserver? Do you know how to configure them. Mark Baker has
mentioned in another message about the possibility of a 2-step relay due to
the percent-hack, and a rather complex interaction where it is expanded in
one step but not the other, do you understand why this is a problem? I'm not
even going to go in the direction of the delivery locking issues... You may
understand all of these issues, I'll make no assumptions about this, however
someone using a "webmin" interface is unlikely to know, probably unlikely to
care, and to a large extent will want insulation from this.
This can cause problems when they have to communicate with other people.
What happens when the webmin has let them set up an open relay and they get
on one of the blacklists, and suddenly they get all these bounces. Their
fancy gui isn't likely to help them read any bounces better. Most people
appear to be totally unable to read bounces, which always gets me, mail
admins have *no* excuse for not reading and understanding a bounce properly.
> so happens I like Exim. Webmin is has modules for Postfix and for
> Sendmail. I see no reason to think that Exim is in some way less
I'm not getting at Exim here. I like exim too, I find its code is relatively
readable, and I've written some of my own patches for it. I'm getting at
the whole concept of configuring a complex system (in this case mail) by
clicking a few checkboxes. I remember seeing a screenshot for an early
version of MacOS X, and seeing this dialog box with:
Mail Server: ( ) On (O) Off
I had the same argument that I'm having with you now with an avid Mac fan
on why this was bad, maybe you don't see it or understand it, in which
case, I'm unlikely to educate you.
> manageable to its users less capable. So if an Exim module for Webmin
I'm not saying this. You missed my point.
> is developed, that would round out Webmin a little more and add to
Wonderful, sysadmin by numbers.
> support for Exim. Neither will ever rate as a reason to pop the
> champagne corks in celebration but both are good ideas nonetheless.
If you think these are good ideas, then my point has gone 180deg in the
opposite direction from you.
No doubt webmin also has a plugin module for configuring DNS, actually,
don't tell me, I'll just get depressed, because after all, DNS is "just
another application".
:-(
MBM
--
Matthew Byng-Maddick <mbm@???> http://colondot.net/
