On Thu, Dec 06, 2001 at 09:25:19AM +0000, Philip Hazel wrote:
> On Wed, 5 Dec 2001, Ollie Cook wrote:
>
> > In our experience, software changes only provoke failures without
> > thorough testing. Philip is always very thorough when it comes to this
> > kind of thing and we've never found a problem testing new features in Exim.
>
> Thank you.
Credit where credit is due! :)
> > In the past, Philip has taken this kind of constructive criticism well,
> > and if he has seen fit has made the appropriate amendments to the code.
>
> It's called "trying to keep the customers happy", which is my way of
> developing software.
It makes a very refreshing change to be able to get involved in where software
'goes' in terms of development - rather than having to work around inflexible
developers. I, for one, am very grateful to you for making that possible.
> Sorry. I should have put a smiley after that, or perhaps wrapped it in
> <troll></troll>. It was, however, slightly serious - big sites running
> serious "corporate" databases (Oracle, etc) are more likely to keep
> everything in one. It makes it easy to process it in ways you didn't
> think of to start with.
You are, of course, quite correct. However, Claranet has grown up from a very
small ISP to quite a big one now and this kind of distinction in data is one
of the things that's, unfortunately, come out of that growth.
I expect we will have to consolidate our data from an administrative point of
view, at some stage.
> I think the problem should be solved differently. If you look at the
> LDAP format, you'll see that in that case, the server can be specified
> with the query, as can the user name and password if required. I think
> we need something similar for the SQL formats, with the global option
> providing a default. I have not thought through this in detail yet. I
> have just noted the requirement on the Exim 4 Wish List.
I hadn't considered that. That's an elegant solution. The only issue I see
with it is redundancy; providing more than one possible host. If my reading
of the spec is correct:
| When, however, no server is specified in a query, a list of default
| servers is taken from the ldap_default_servers configuration option
| This supplies a colon-separated list of servers which are tried in turn
| until one successfully handles a query, or there is a serious error.
.. then you get redundancy, only if you *don't* specify a server.
Something to consider...?
Thanks for your input.
Yours,
Ollie
--
Oliver Cook Systems Administrator, ClaraNET
ollie@??? 020 7903 3065
