OS to replace FreeBSD

[Valeri Galtsev]

On 3/19/21 10:24 AM, Paul wrote:
> Sendmail is good enough for Microsoft Outlook Exchange Servers and Apple 
> ICloud but it’s not good enough for poor Jerry. Maybe you should upgrade 
> to their commercial version if you think that the open source is not 
> serving you massively enough. They are serving more than 1/2 of the 
> Fortune 500 companies maybe even your favorite Mike Dell but poor Jerry 
> doesn’t like it... https://www.proofpoint.com/us/customer-stories 
> <https://www.proofpoint.com/us/customer-stories>
> 

Paul, do not mock people who prefer postfix. And I am NOT Jerry, BTW.

But you forced me. Some 20+ years back it was fresh in everyone's memory 
that the worm used sendmail bug and did a lot of damage on the internet 
(everybody remembers the name of the guy who wrote the worm, right?). 
So, back then when I was deciding what SMTP server I run, here were the 
decisive factors:

1. Postfix is written (by brilliant guy Vietse Venema working then for 
IBM) from scratch with security in mind. It has several separate 
components. Most notably: the daemon that is listening to the SMTP 
(SMTPS) port(s) and the only component that is exposed to external world 
is very simple short code that just communicates, checks what's 
necessary and accepts message for further processing. It is very hard to 
have overlooked bugs in simple short program. And that daemon runs as 
regular user. Sendmail (at that time at least) was one huge program 
(hence it is much harder to debug and make it clean) that did 
everything, including listening to internet, and the daemon runs as user 
root.

That is really big difference security wise.

2. This did not matter at the moment of making choice, but over years I 
became really appreciative of this: postfix has plain ASCII 
configuration files, which clear logic. And you read the file that IS 
used by the server running.

I know, things have changed since long time ago, and sendmail is secure, 
etc. But the above still is true to a significant extent.

And, BTW, as all sysadmins I did not miss a chapter: "configuring and 
running sendmail". And I can (to an extent) edit sendmail's "low level" 
config files directly (not only config file from which these are 
"compiled"), which loosely compares to editing assembly code vs high 
level programming language code ;-)  Yet, I still prefer postfix's plain 
ASCII config files.


I do not believe you made me write this.

Valeri

> Envoyé de mon iPhone
> 
>> Le 19 mars 2021 à 11:06, Valeri Galtsev <galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu> a 
>> écrit :
>>
>> 
>>
>> On 3/19/21 9:42 AM, Paul wrote:
>>> Or you could try not being lazy and fixing the bug yourself it’s an 
>>> open source software and you’re free to rewrite the kernel however 
>>> you like so don’t play these games with us if freebsd is good enough 
>>> for Apple in their build of xnu , Microsoft and Seagate, ARM, etc. , 
>>> IT SHOULD BE GOOD ENOUGH FOR JERRY, so don’t play this game with us 
>>> and sendmail.org is the default mail server not postfix...
>>
>> I join you on all counts... but I for one always replace sendmail with 
>> postfix since forever (for over 2 decades). But of course, I will 
>> refrain to list my (and other people) reasons.
>>
>> Valeri
>>
>>> Envoyé de mon iPad
>>>> Le 19 mars 2021 à 10:34, Matthias Gamsjager <mgamsjager at gmail.com> a 
>>>> écrit :
>>>>
>>>> On Fri, 19 Mar 2021 at 15:16, Jerry <jerry at seibercom.net> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> With the soon-to-be release of version 13 of FreeBSD and the EOL of
>>>>> FreeBSD 11.x, I will need to invest in a new OS. Due to FreeBSD’s
>>>>> unfortunate inability to squash bug
>>>>> https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=237666, l am left
>>>>> with no choice but to seek out a new OS. I need a bare-bones system
>>>>> that can run a mail server, Postfix with Dovecot, and a few other
>>>>> utilities.
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> Jerry
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Not sure what you want to hear. You could also try a different 
>>>> motherboard.
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>
>> -- 
>> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>> Valeri Galtsev
>> Sr System Administrator
>> Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
>> Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
>> University of Chicago
>> Phone: 773-702-4247
>> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>> _______________________________________________
>> freebsd-questions at freebsd.org mailing list
>> https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
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-- 
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Valeri Galtsev
Sr System Administrator
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Phone: 773-702-4247
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++