Re: Free software companies and stock options

[Suresh Ramasubramanian <sureshr@xxxxxxx>]

Kiran Jonnalagadda rearranged electrons thusly:

> I'm referring to a corporate intranet server where the number of users
> ranges from 100 to 500. Few will notice if it goes offline for a few
> minutes.
 
 Heh ;)  You ought to see my lan here - a bit less than 400 users, all of whom
 love to bitch when the connection goes down for a while.
 
> Now qmail is very finicky about following SMTP standards. If someone
> tries to violate them, qmail will simply refuse to accept the message.
> One of these SMTP requirements is that messages should have lines
> terminated with CR/LF, not just LF in Unix style.
 
 Which is _over_-correct behavior.
 
> but there no update since fetchmail 5.0. I mailed fetchmail-friends, and
> ESR responded with a one-liner that my MTA was broken.
 
 qmail?  I don't want to start an MTA war - but Dan Bernstein had to (iirc)
 tone down qmail's finickiness after several such incidents - the latest qmail
 is much more tolerant of broken mailers and (mild) rfc violations than the
 older ones.
 
> had volunteered to setup Linux, the "wonderful, robust, scalable"
> operating system, and it had in return chained me to the mail server.
 
 Tried sendmail or exim instead? ;)
 
> had been numerous updates since 5.0 and the bug that my fetchmail had,
> had been fixed before I even setup the server (via the "forcecr"
> option). But updates.redhat.com had never bothered to carry it. You can

sorry - not a fetchmail bug at all.  It is a qmail feature, if you want to lay
the blame somewhere - ESR was right in that it was not, per se, a fetchmail
problem :)

Wouldn't the maker's site be the place to check for updates, rather than a
distro vendor's site?

> virtually no maintenance done for many months, and my uptime goes to
> about 70 days until there's either a power failure or some moron pulls
> the plug (Ctrl+Alt+Del at the console is disabled).
 
 heh - our UPS tripped today, bringing down a box that'd been going strong for
 about three months :(
 
> But the point of all this is: Do not expect a smooth ride if you're
> planning to move to Linux. No distro I've used so far has worked without

the latest deadrat works practically out of the box, more or less.  Customized
add-ons to any packaged solution _will_ require maintenance by hand - unless
you add some sort of admintool for the new package.  I've not seen qmail
bundled with redhat yet ... and redhat's sendmail works just fine.

> if you're serious about IMAP, keep a good distance from UW-IMAP (which
> RH comes with). It sucks).
 
 Yup - courier IMAP is far better.  Ditto with ProFTPD instead of wu-ftpd.
 
> Tools like linuxconf are particularly dangerous. linuxconf has almost
> always messed up my system's configuration. I once used it on

Uncomment the line in inetd.conf which allows linuxconf access over http - and
dont start linuxconf at startup.

	+suresh