[geeks] configuring new mail server: need information on private LAN setup

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

On Sat, 24 Mar 2007 09:41:57 +0200
Michael-John Turner <mj at turner.org.za> wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 22, 2007 at 03:41:25PM -0500, Michael Parson wrote:
> > Not to start a holy war or anything, but as long as you are starting
> > over, might I suggest you move to Postfix?  The config is much easier to
> > manage and understand, plus the FAQ on postfix.org covers most of the
> > stuff you might want to do.
> 
> Agreed. One other thing to be aware of - NetBSD 4.0 and later will no
> longer ship with sendmail in the base system. postfix, which has been in
> the base system for many releases (back to the 1.x [1.5?] days) but was not
> the default MTA, has replaced sendmail as the default MTA. Of course,
> sendmail will remain available in pkgsrc.

True.

However, I don't see why you guys think it is easier than sendmail.

Yes, the install files are in semi-english, but for a standard networked UNIX
mail setup, both sendmail and postfix pretty much work out of the box.

sendmail configuration has not required messing with sendmail's language in a
long time now.

You edit your site config, usually under a dozen lines, generate sendmail.cf,
and then edit some tables.

With postfix or any other mailer, it is mostly the same: edit configuration
to pick features and edit tables.

In any case, I'm having the same issues getting postfix to work in my setup
as sendmail, so for me both are a real PITA.

3 years ago, I had both working, but postfix had some problems so I stayed
with sendmail.

Now I can't make either work.

Despite what I would think is a common setup (a private LAN with a full MTA
and a dynamic WAN IP address), there is very little documentation on how to
set that up.

NetBSD provides an example configuration, but it doesn't work, not completely.

I'm working on both of them.  Whichever configuration works first wins, and
I'll post it here.

I believe I'm very close with both of them.  You know how the last 10% takes
90% of the time.

-- 
shannon / There is a limit to how stupid people really are, just as there's
-------'  a limit to the amount of hydrogen in the Universe.  There's a lot, 
but there's a limit.  -- Dave C. Barber on a.f.c.