[Mimedefang] Latest MIME-Tools

[Stephen Smoogen]

On Mon, 2004-03-22 at 12:54, Justin wrote:
> On Mon, 22 Mar 2004, Nels Lindquist wrote:
> 
> > Which RedHat distribution are you using?  PostgreSQL RPMs have been 
> > included on the CD (though not necessarily installed by default) at 
> > least as far back as 6.2, and if you want a more recent version, 
> > binary and source RPMs can be downloaded directly from 
> > http://www.postgresql.org/.
> 
> Our new mail system is unfortunately using RH9.  I would have preferred
> 7.3 but kernel drivers with 9 were required by some of the hardware.
> 
> I almost never use any outward facing daemons that aren't compiled from
> source.  I compile just about everything from source if given the 
> opportunity.  RH is terrible about keeping up with the latest greatest 
> unless it involves a critical security fix.  RH is also terrible about 
> using the compile-time options that I want.  When was the last time you 
> used an RPM to install Apache or MIMEDefang? :)
> 
> > "Better" is somewhat subjective. :-)
> > 
> > Having to recompile from source every time there's, let's say, a 
> > security patch for glibc doesn't strike me as necessarily superior to 
> > a binary package when you're talking about server maintenance.
> 
> Well, anything is better than RH9.  This is the 4th RH9 box I've set up in
> as many months and I'm left wondering if the RH engineers actually woke up
> in the morning and thought to themselves "Where can we randomly put
> libraries today and how many oddball things can we statically link to
> them?"  LOL.  I swear half the job of getting a new RH9 server online is
> undoing all of the oddball RH intricacies.  Why in the world did they put 
> kerberos in /usr/kerberos?  Why UTF-8?  Why is pine statically linked to 

kerberos was put into /usr/kerberos because at one point that was the
recommended place by MIT I think (sort of like /usr/X11R6/ etc). The
reasoning being that people needing kerberized rsh, etc wouldnt need to
know names like k5telnet, but just have /usr/kerberos/bin in their path
before /usr/bin and get the right thing. Those that didnt need k5telnet
could use the other way. The FHS standard clarified where it should go
(/usr/bin) and so Fedora now uses that.

UTF-8 was used and made the default because the US turned out not to be
the center of the Universe... and people wanted to use their own
character sets without having to continue the various hacks that had
been used. I dont like UTF-8 either and recommend the LANG=C for my
servers.. however I have heard Linus likes his Finnish and Alan his
welsh character sets.

I think the pine was done because several customers complained that they
had set up their systems using SASL version 1 and they were damned if
they wanted to roll out new servers for a new RH. 

RPM is obtuse because it lets you do lots of things. A lot of those
things might not be needed for every environment, which makes it a pain
(but whenever items are listed as going to be removed.. you should hear
the howls of protest (from even people who dont use XYZ feature but dont
want it gone because maybe ABC that they do use will be next).).

> an old version of SASL?  Why does RPM have to be so darned obtuse?  I'm 
> just getting sick of RH.  7.3 was good enough for most of my servers after 

Gentoo is supposedly the rad new distro people are trying out. I know
that it gives a lot of control for some people, but trying to roll out
updates on 20+ machines looks 'painful'.

I would say that for your style of system administration (compile it all
from source), that Gentoo might be your best bet.

-- 
Stephen John Smoogen		smoogen at lanl.gov
Los Alamos National Lab  CCN-5 Sched 5/40  PH: 4-0645
Ta-03 SM-1498 MailStop B255 DP 10S  Los Alamos, NM 87545
-- So shines a good deed in a weary world. = Willy Wonka --