8 Apr
2004
8 Apr
'04
8:50 a.m.
It was thus said that the Great chris once stated:
Postfix comes with a "sendmail" replacement, so anything that calls
sendmail will run generally without modification, which is quite nice
actually.
-spc (Oh, and I should mention that the 486 server mentioned aboved
*was* colocated at a hosting facility ... )
In fact, like you point out, since I want to run on old hardware, I may
be better off going with something that isn't going to expect me to
constantly add to it... that way once it is running, I can just leave it
running and not have to worry about regular updates (probably the single
biggest reason why I won't run Windows based internet servers... they
expect you to do updates too often, I don't have the time/desire to jerk
around with that).
As someone who ran a mailserver on old hardware (33MHz 486 with 20M RAM
running RedHat 5.2 with a Linux 2.0.39 kernel) I had no problems with it:
[root]tower:/root> uptime
10:43pm up 443 days, 22:57, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
[root]tower:/root>
A bit sluggish and very relunctant to run *anything* written in Perl, but
other than that, running two dozen websites, and email, it chugged along for
four years (decommisioned in June of 2003, but had I run it another month or
so, the uptime would have wrapped).
I would recommend running something *other* than sendmail, if only because
sendmail is a piece of Swiss cheese when it comes to security and it's only
of *when*, not *if* there is another security hole found. Towards the end I
did run Postfix without noticable degredation.
I haven't
run Sendmail in aeons;
I've heard enough horror stories about Sendmail to know that I probably
don't want to use it. From what I gather, its great, IF you know how to
use it... but if you are new to it, be prepared to move the sacrificial
lambs off the SCSI god alter and onto the Sendmail god alter.
(Ironically, Sendmail is the only *nix mailer I have used already... I'm
running it on both my web servers for handling emails created by web
forms... but I didn't really have to do much to get it up and running,
just a little tweaking to lock it down from the outside)