[Mimedefang] Re: "Please try again later"

[Wesley Peters]

Sorry about the late reply, I'm catching up on some mail list traffic
and found a couple of items to reply to in this thread.  I'll try not to
bore you too much.

On Sunday, September 11, 2005 10:47 AM, Les Mikesell <mailto:les at futuresource.com> alleged:

> On Sun, 2005-09-11 at 04:36, ADNET Ghislain wrote:
> 
>> Debian and FreeBSD are a breeze compared to Redhat in my little
>> experience. I must say my experiences with FreeBSD is really good, the
>> packages are updated and very well thinked as, like on gentoo they are
>> compiled so you can choose in an array of options to best suit your
>> setup. 
> 
> Disregard anything you know about RH before/other than the Enterprise
> versions RHEL3 and RHEL4 unless you want up-to-the second
> desktop apps.
> I have an equivalent lack of experience with debian and
> everything I've
> seen other than knoppix and ubuntu have been about 5 years behind what
> I'd want to run.  Are you finding the stuff you like in some unstable
> add-on directory? 

Many people don't seem to have found it yet, but Colin Percival has a binary
update service for FreeBSD supported versions now.  Support for a number of
key ports/packages, including all the important mail-related ones, is planned 
as soon as the volume is up enough to support the work.  The only manual 
intervention required happens if there are merge conflicts in configuration 
files, which is rare.  I believe both 5.3 and 5.4 are currently offered, and probably
4.10 and 4.11 as well.

DaemonNews is in the process of providing a subscription service based on
Colin's work at https://bsdupdates.com/.  This service is free for individual
machines.

Updating a STABLE FreeBSD system from source using CVSup and make 
couldn't be much easier, if you're into building from source.  This does come in
handy when an update includes changes to the kernel and you run with a
custom kernel configuration, since the binary update service can only offer
patched GENERIC kernels.

>> I do my best to stay away from non package version to be able to keep up
>> with the "upgrade patch nightmare", after all sysadmin are mainly patch
>> managers nowadays ;)
> 
> I build MD and clamav by hand just so I am sure I am completely up to
> date with them without waiting for someone else to package
> them.  Other
> than that (and the corresponding tweaking of sendmail.mc with the
> rest conveniently handled by 'make' with provided Makefile, nothing
> on my mail gateway has needed anything but an occasional 'yum update'
> in years (it's running centos 3.5. I'm starting to move to Centos 4 on
> some other machines where I want the newer mysql, etc.).

Those (and other key ports) in FreeBSD are well maintained and usually
updated within a day or so of new releases.  If you find exceptions, like the
recent 2 weeks asleep-at-the-switch MD port update, feel free to email the
port maintainer (me, in this case.)  I actually had the port updated the DAY
MD 2.53 was released, but somehow managed to forget to commit it until
prompted by a user request this weekend.  Doh!

Ports can be updated via CVSup, or via portsnap, which is much faster.
The FreeBSD Project also maintains pre-built packages for currently
supported releases, including 5.3 and 5.4.  These can be installed on
your system (or updated) with the pkg_add -r option.

More information about portsnap and binary updates can be found at
http://www.daemonology.net/.

	Pax,
	Wes