On Sunday, December 13, 2015 6:24:50 AM EDT, Heiko Schlittermann wrote:
> Hi,
>
>> Nonetheless, it's easier for (at least some) people to understand the
>> exim4 file than the Debian stuff. I tried to stick to the debconf
>> mechanism when I first had my VPS, but it became just too hard to keep
>> track of where everything was and how the variables interacted, as
>> soon as I wanted to do non-trivial things. A single text file is much
>> easier to find one's way about.
>
> It probably should be pointed out, that the debian configuration stuff
> makes the Exim configration roughly comparable with the complexity of
> configuring Fostpix. But Exim goes further than Fostpix, but I'd say 80%
> of the users don't care.
>
> And for 80% of the users of Exim it's sufficient to have the Debian
> config way. The last 20% may want to go into the details of the
> native configuration. But this does not allow me (as one of the
> 20%) to ignore the 80%.
Keep in mind that the "Debian config way" has TWO options: the "split"
configuration, and the non-split configuration. I use the non-split
configuration so that there's just one big configuration file to edit.
> If Exim has a significant market 'share', then that's because of Debian, I
> suppose.
It's not. Debian Developers thought this same thing when the choice of
default MTA was last discussed in 2013 in [debian-devel] whereby this
survey was mentioned (which is updated once a month) showing that Exim
became the most popular MTA in 2008, and has remained most popular since.
http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/man.201511/mxsurvey.html
Others looked further at the bottom of the survey pages, and found that (at
least at that time) the versions of Exim that were most popular /weren't/
the versions that Debian shipped.
> Even I personally don't like the Debian config stuff, I think if the
> Debian way of configuration can be generalized and get part of the Exim
> distribution. Because from what I see it provides a kind of interface
> that could allow easy integration into configuration management systems
> that exist outside the Debian universum. In a much better way than the
> classic exim.conf, that is more of the TIMTOWTDI style of thinking.
About two years ago I set up Exim on RHEL 6 and had to set up an exim.conf
file directly, and found it a lot more difficult than using Debian's
default non-split exim4.conf.template file. I ended up copy-pasting a
bunch of config snippets from the Debian default Exim4 config to get things
up and running faster.
In general the suggestion to use a "standard" exim.conf file is probably
fine, except that in /this particular case/ the person being given this
advice is an admin who has stated he isn't familiar with Exim cofigs, which
makes this a problematic suggestion because it's a fair bit of work to do
the conversion. One needs to become familar with the MTA configs, how to
test them, etc. When one is asking about fixing a specific IPv6 vs IPv4
problem probably isn't the best time to suggest this.
I'm wondering if "interface = <IPv4_address>" could be used within the
remote_smtp transport to force using a local IPv4 address outbound.
-- Chris
--
Chris Knadle
Chris.Knadle@???
