Why sendmail?

[Gerard Seibert]

Gabriel O'Brien wrote:

> Indeed.  While I do sometimes question the sense of defaulting to 
> sendmail due to its baggage, it's so trivial to change the MTA that it's 
> largely a non-issue.  In the interest of being close to a "reference 
> implementation" of BSD it does make some sense as a default even if I'd 
> never run it on a prod box myself.  It hardly seems worth the churn.
> 
> Insert $0.02 here.

I agree for the most part. There is an option to install another MTA
when installing FBSD. However, it might be nice if there were
instructions on how to accomplish the following.

1) Totally shut down Sendmail
2) Changes to periodic.conf
3) How to prevent Sendmail from being built when performing 'buildworld'

I know that the documentation does exist, but it is not all centrally
located. At least I do not think it is. If Postfix is installed during
the installation of FBSD, the end user is not even presented with the
necessary items to place in the /etc/rc.conf file. That should be done
automatically by the sysinstall process, as well as modifying the
periodic.conf and make.conf files.

I recently replied to a post on the Postfix forum when a user had
installed Postfix when installing FBSD and consequently had no idea why
it was not working correctly. I realize that he should have been better
informed as to how it was to be configured; however, the sysinstall or
if installed via ports, the posts installation routine should have given
a more complete description of what is or should be done to complete the
installation.

Just my 2¢.


-- 
Gerard Seibert
gerard at seibercom.net


Think about it: The *average* American has one tit and one testicle.