[H-GEN] Replacement?

[Ewan Edwards]

[ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
[ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]

On Tue, 5 Nov 2002 15:21, Sarah Walters wrote:
> [ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
> [ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]
>
> Well, I've been thinking about the whole mail server issue (haven't really
> had time to look into my sendmail problem, hence no update) and I am
> thinking that sendmail might be more than I need anyway.
>
> So I'm going to initiate a religious war by asking what MTAs people use
> and why? All responses welcome. I'm running FreeBSD 4.7 as a firewall, mail

The religous war does not seem to eventuating, so far ... curious.

I use Postfix for my office MTA.  Why?  A friend recommended it over Sendmail 
when I told him what I intended doing for the new office, and I decided (for 
no better reason) to accept his recommendation.

>
> Minimum requirements:
>

I can't state categorically (since I don't know enough) that Postfix will meet 
all your requirements, but after perusing the Postfix users mail list for a 
few days, I am quite sure it will, and lots more.

>
> Security is a major issue. Setuid binaries - especially sitting on an
> open port ala older versions of sendmail - make me uncomfortable.

Postfix refuses to run as root.  The install instructions talk about setting 
up a separate user ID/account for Postfix to run under.

>
> Performance is not an issue at the moment. There's only two people using
> the damn thing, and it's a 1.3 ghz celeron so short of a DOS it should
> be able to cope with anything I throw at it. However I would like any
> opinions about comparative performance of MTAs.

The office server I'm running at the moment is a PII-233 with 256Mb RAM and a 
single 4.3Gb hdd.  It is supporting 26 email accounts for a software 
development team, 3 very active mail lists (one used by customers for 
support) and 3 not so active mail lists.  I'm using Mailman for the mail list 
mangement.  The following top output should give you an idea of how its 
performing under that load.

<snip>
  8:17am  up 50 days, 20:54,  1 user,  load average: 0.07, 0.09, 0.07
47 processes: 46 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states:  0.7% user,  0.0% system,  0.0% nice, 99.2% idle
Mem:   255908K av,  244076K used,   11832K free,       0K shrd,   69164K buff
Swap:  529192K av,    5080K used,  524112K free                   91640K 
cached

  PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME COMMAND
32071 root      16   0   984  984   796 R     0.5  0.3   0:00 top
    1 root      15   0   484  448   420 S     0.0  0.1   0:05 init
    2 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:03 keventd
    3 root      34  19     0    0     0 SWN   0.0  0.0   0:00 ksoftirqd_CPU0
    4 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:41 kswapd
    5 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 bdflush
    6 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:01 kupdated
    7 root      25   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 mdrecoveryd
   11 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   9:45 kjournald
   90 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 khubd
  183 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 kjournald
24041 root      15   0   584  572   536 S     0.0  0.2   2:51 syslogd
24046 root      15   0   444  428   428 S     0.0  0.1   0:00 klogd
24066 rpc       15   0   572  548   488 S     0.0  0.2   0:17 portmap
24094 rpcuser   19   0   676  588   588 S     0.0  0.2   0:00 rpc.statd
24153 root      16   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 loop0
24202 named     15   0  3368 3220  1792 S     0.0  1.2   0:00 named
24204 named     15   0  3368 3220  1792 S     0.0  1.2   0:00 named
24205 named     15   0  3368 3220  1792 S     0.0  1.2   0:56 named
24206 named     15   0  3368 3220  1792 S     0.0  1.2   0:00 named
24207 named     15   0  3368 3220  1792 S     0.0  1.2   0:06 named
24227 root      15   0  1200 1112  1024 S     0.0  0.4   0:08 sshd
24260 root      15   0   904  788   708 S     0.0  0.3   2:28 xinetd
24341 root      15   0  1120  948   888 S     0.0  0.3   1:00 master
24360 root      15   0   432  392   376 S     0.0  0.1   0:01 gpm
24389 root      15   0  7132 6680  6568 S     0.0  2.6   0:03 httpd
24407 root      15   0   616  584   540 S     0.0  0.2   0:03 crond
24459 xfs       15   0  2920  624   604 S     0.0  0.2   0:00 xfs
24495 daemon    15   0   520  468   456 S     0.0  0.1   0:00 atd
24514 root      15   0   580  548   512 S     0.0  0.2   0:07 rhnsd
24522 root      16   0   392  340   340 S     0.0  0.1   0:00 mingetty
24523 root      16   0   392  340   340 S     0.0  0.1   0:00 mingetty
24524 root      17   0   392  340   340 S     0.0  0.1   0:00 mingetty
24525 root      17   0   392  340   340 S     0.0  0.1   0:00 mingetty
24526 root      17   0   392  340   340 S     0.0  0.1   0:00 mingetty
17007 postfix   15   0  1336 1172   972 S     0.0  0.4   5:36 nqmgr
25358 root      16   0   400  400   344 S     0.0  0.1   0:00 mingetty
30398 apache    15   0  7332 6888  6612 S     0.0  2.6   0:00 httpd
30399 apache    15   0  7340 6896  6616 S     0.0  2.6   0:00 httpd
30400 apache    15   0  7380 6936  6584 S     0.0  2.7   0:00 httpd
31748 postfix   15   0  1120 1120   904 S     0.0  0.4   0:00 pickup
31783 postfix   15   0  1448 1448  1092 S     0.0  0.5   0:00 trivial-rewrite
31996 postfix   15   0  1584 1584  1252 S     0.0  0.6   0:00 smtpd
31997 postfix   17   0  1200 1200   952 S     0.0  0.4   0:00 cleanup
31998 postfix   16   0  1476 1476  1164 S     0.0  0.5   0:00 local
32024 root      15   0  1768 1724  1452 S     0.0  0.6   0:00 sshd
32026 root      15   0  1300 1300   972 S     0.0  0.5   0:00 bash
</snip>







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