On Tue, Mar 23, 2004 at 08:49:13AM -0500, Scott Veirs wrote:
> Hey guys, forgive me for asking such a question but since I AM a windows
> admin and still new to Exim and Debian, are there any GUI's for Exim that
> might make it easier to find the funtionality I want without having to learn
> every command? Visual reminders help me learn some things faster.
> Thanks.
> FYI - at the moment our Debian is CLI as well. Might be changing that.
Hey Scott,
I understand your frustration :-) But for the most part (and mostly for
everything you want), the answer is no. Tools do exist which provide a
web-interface to manage users and domains, but not really much else (if
this is what you want, look at my sig).
Learning the options DOES take longer, more effort and patience.
Using a GUI IS simpler and often faster is you're new to the system.
However, the real reason you won't find a good GUI for exim, or a GUI of
your Unix OS which is accepted as "ok" by the larger Unix community, is
that it flies in the face of tradition.
The technical reasons behind this are many, and everyone has their
favourite. Amongst the top ones are:
Extra development time for each change we make
Power is taken away from the user
The complexity of some things cannot be easily simplified
etc etc. As an example, if you learn how ACL's work (it took me only a
few minutes), you will see that they simply cannot be re-created in a
GUI. What a lot of options let you do is open-ended. You do not have a
fixed list of settings to choose from. Instead, you can make the setting
whatever you want!
Example: spamd_address, acl_smtp_helo, rfc1413_hosts, local_domains, etc
none of these has a fixed set of settings, and would just give you a
blank box to fill in - ie not much different from editing the config in
your text editor :-)
Then lets look at ACL's.
An example ACL I use is:
drop condition = ${if match{$sender_helo_name}{^[0-9]\.[0-9]\.[0-9]\.[0-9]}{yes}{no} }
message = "Dropped IP-only or IP-starting helo"
This ACL drops connections where the HELO starts with an IP address. How
could this be replicated in a GUI? I suppose you could have a
pre-defined list of ACL which you could choose to apply to not to apply,
but that seems rather silly. You can't just make your own stuff up then
and are tied down to inadequette settings which don't serve your needs.
Ultimately it makes more sense to learn how the product works in as much
details as necessary. That way, when you have a problem, you actually
stand a chance of fixing it yourself before yelling for help on a minor
issue (yeah, we all do this, but we should at least try first :)
A significant portion of the Unix philosophy centers around giving as
much control to the user / administrator as possible. This means the
user / administrator has a *LOT* of learning to do. I do believe
however, that it is worth it in the end. This is also why Unix
administrators are generally paid more than Windows administrators
(everywhere I've been to, at least).
And finally, if you're stuck and don't know what to do.. well.. that's
what this mailing list is for :-)
