Re: no default mta [was Re: Fedora Present and Future: a Fedora.next 2014 Update (Part I, “Why?”)]

[Bill Davidsen]

Rick Stevens wrote:
> On 03/21/2014 10:30 AM, Matthew Miller issued this missive:
>> On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 10:27:02AM -0700, Joe Zeff wrote:
>>> If you do need to use sendmail, and your ISP is blocking Port 25,
>>> it's not that hard to configure things to use a smarthost.  As an
>>> example, I have my own (vanity) domain and use its mail servers,
>>> over Port 587.  I also have sendmail configured to use that server
>>> and port, along with the appropriate username/password.  If anybody
>>> out there needs to do the same thing, instructions are at
>>> http://www.zeff.us/SMTPAuth.txt
>>
>> Absolutely. But since you need to configure it before it's useful, it's
>> arguably actively harmful to have it running by default. That's all. No one
>> is removing MTAs from the distro.
>
> I agree that an MTA needs to be installed unless you're installing a
> "server" (and Fedora really doesn't offer that model anymore).
>
> For quite a while, Fedora had installed an MTA and started it. By
> default, it was configured to only listen to localhost on port 25 so
> it was more-or-less innocuous. The fact that F19 stopped installing an
> MTA by default caught a lot of people off guard.
>
Sure did. And made it hard to get sendmail working usefully, IIRC both 
sendmail.mc and firewall were set to force you to talk only to yourself.

> Unlike others, however, I find the new system logging and analysis tools
> cumbersome and painful to use. Having a program send an email to me if
> it encounters issues is FAR superior to me having to plow through the
> logs to see if it ran correctly or not.

In general I like logs, but that's me. That way I can go through and get what I 
want with perl, or grep, or sed, or whatever I need. Easier than making emails 
recombine for a moving overview.

-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot