Postfix 161
| Postfix: The Definitive Guide | |
| author | Kyle D. Dent |
| pages | 260 |
| publisher | O'Reilly and Associates |
| rating | 8/10 - Excellent book, a little thin on details in a few places |
| reviewer | Tony Williams |
| ISBN | 0596002122 |
| summary | An excellent guide to installing, configuring and running Postfix |
Fortunately, my first needs were simple and I came to realise that Postfix was a much easier system to install and maintain. Now that my needs are more complex, I was glad when this book hit my desk at exactly the same time as I started upgrading the corporate servers from Mac OS 9 to OS X Server.
Postfix: The Definitive Guide seems to fit the bill. It is a well-written and well-constructed guide to mail systems in general and Postfix in particular. (Oh, and speaking of definitive, could someone at O'Reilly provide a definitive answer to both reviewers and their own editors as to that colon? This is the second 'Definitive Guide' I've reviewed in as many months, and they are sprinkled with instances of each book's title, sometimes including that colon, sometimes leaving it out.)
The book starts with a good overview of the underlying technology in Chapters 1 and 2. I can't blame Dent for my slight confusion in the section on addresses and headers - having RFC822 superseded by RFC2822 was just a little too much coincidence for this particular "bear of little brain." He then follows it with a chapter discussing Postfix's architecture, important since Postfix uses a much more modular approach than the sendmail monolith, with each part of the mail handling process a different executable and the single queue turned into five.
Once the background is well covered, Dent then gets onto the nitty-gritty of configuring and administering Postfix. He has certainly covered everything I needed, including spam handling, multiple domains, relaying, SASL authentication and using LDAP. Once I'd finished grokking all that, and getting it integrated into my servers, I had a corporate email system up in three sites that replaced and improved upon a couple of thousand dollars worth of proprietary dreck. Happy is an understatement.
Dent's writing is sometimes a little patchy, though never bad. The technical detail does seem overpowering in places, though, and I occasionally found myself reading a section through more than once with a configuration file open in front of me. There are certainly spots where a little more hand holding and care with the writing would have been appreciated. (If you are a little more cognizant of the interstices of mail systems then you may not have the same problem.)
I did, however, appreciate the appendices enormously. The four appendices cover configuration parameters, Postfix commands, installation, and an FAQ. My system came with Postfix compiled and installed just as I required it so I didn't get a chance to thoroughly test out Dent's installation procedure (though it looks good); the other three continue to be useful.
If you want to have a look for yourself, then the usual O'Reilly page is complete with a table of contents and index, but this time no example chapter is provided (how come, O'Reilly?). You can also get an expanded version of the FAQ in Appendix 4 from Dent's website. A better example of Dent's writing style is an excellent article on troubleshooting with Postfix logs at O'Reilly's Onlamp.com.
This is an excellent book, Dent has explained the underlying methodology and use of Postfix well, taken the reader through all aspects of this MTA system and explained both the why and the how. I would recommend this book (and, as a result Postfix) to anyone looking for an MTA and a guide to configuring and running it.
You can purchase Postfix: The Definitive Guide from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
it took you this long to switch from sendmail? (Score:5, Insightful)
A few years ago I simply wanted to re-write my host.domain.tld address on outgoing email to be simply host.tld. I bawked at the stupidities of learning a crappy sendmail language, then re-compiling it into yet another crappy language just to do this. A friend told me about postfix, and I've never looked back. I think only the massochistic, or those hopelessly lost in a legacy sendmail mess use sendmail these days.
Re:it took you this long to switch from sendmail? (Score:5, Insightful)
am i the only dork that decided to learn sendmail, and now have no issue with its configuration??
sheesh. i didnt think it was that hard -- ofcourse, i can see its complexity with a huge organization...but once its setup up, count on never having to touch it until an exploit is found (and these days, it seems rare for sendmail).
oh well....
back to that cf file.
Re:I'm not trolling, really... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:i stopped reading after i ran into this... (Score:3, Insightful)
our servers are mostly OS9 as well because the old computers migrate into servers and our office is mostly mac-based (blame the person who's name is on the company for making that decision 15 years ago)
I'd rather hear from someone who has a tough situation and how they figured a way out of it than from someone who has all the resources they want
Re:Postfix doesn't require a book (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:i stopped reading after i ran into this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry that's just my impression, but a matter of fact is that IT managers don't allow willy/nilly upgrades. In fact the chances are that in real life, you're managing something that was not designed by you. So you have to put up with whatever is there. And if it works... sort of
Same goes for coding; you take over project someone else has started and it might well be that you'll find yourself learning COBOL. You think that writing a CPU simulator in Java is stupid and inefficient; who cares we want it to run faster and you do whatever is needed to make that happen. That's life.
Ever seen an S390? Do you know how much IBM charges for fixing these? Do you have an idea how slow they are? But just taking the risk of upgrading to something new usually isn't worth it in real life.
Btw. he wasn't giving any advice on running a network, just a book review.
Re:it took you this long to switch from sendmail? (Score:5, Insightful)
OK I may just be jaded because sendmail has gotten me though some tough times and nasty issues at a time when uucp was still common.
Sendmail under Panther (Score:3, Insightful)
Sendmail was incompatible with xcode, probably because of the latest version of GCC. I just checked, and it seems to have been fixed in 8.12.11. At the time it was easier to find a 10.2 box than to dig up the compiler switch command and remember to switch it back afterwards.
Re:i stopped reading after i ran into this... (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyway, who better to write a review of an introductory Postfix book than an admin just switching to Unix?
Re:Thank Apple for (Score:2, Insightful)
The FreeBSD realation with Apple is technically one-sided, Apple benefits, FreeBSD doesn't.
Well, I thought that was what the BSD license's for. You write code, a company comes in, takes it, does whatever suits them without any need of giving back. If you want a reciprocal relationship, license the code under the GPL.
About sendmail.cf (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm no sendmail appologizer, but the only time anyone should be messing with
As for me, I've been using qmail since '97 and I recommend it to anyone with the patience to change the way they think about MTA configuration. It's well worth the one week of agonizing confusion. You'll wonder why anyone would do it any other way.
Re:honestpuck (Score:5, Insightful)
I was in two minds about replying to this. I decided that since I let the last two similar comments slide it was about time to raise my voice again.
First. If you'd like a "critical" review (in fact most reviews raise at least one or two criticisms of a book, I think you mean "negative") then you only need to go back as far as my last review, "Learn How to Program Using Any Web Browser" [slashdot.org]. If you want to read a review where I totally pan a book then try my review of Online! The Book [slashdot.org].
Second, I enjoy reading technical books and I enjoy writing. Slashdot just happens to be an open site for book reviews. From the number of book reviews that receive a large number of comments I'd say a lot of people enjoy reading them. From the number Timothy passes through the system I'd say he is fairly often short of reviews. Perhaps the negative, unknowing, unthinking comments of people such as yourself is one reason for that shortage. I've certainly noticed that the number of comments such as yours far outnumber the compliments that reviewers get.
Third. No one pays me to write these reviews. I do get to have my user id linking to my website. Last quarter that made a grand total of $21, which I took as an Amazon Gift Certificate to (patrially) feed my book habit. My guess is about 3/4 of that was due to getting my reviews published here.
Fourth. Yes, some of the books I review are sent to me by publishers. Some I buy, some are borrowed from friends. I just did a quick check and over the last few months I've refused to have sent to me by publishers about the same number I've said "yes" too. Both of the book reviews I mentioned above are actually of books sent to me by publishers so I believe I can truthfully say I am not influenced by how a book comes to me.
Finally, if you think my reviews are those of a "paid shill" you have two perfect solutions. Either write your own reviews or just don't read mine.
Tony Williams
Well, yes... (Score:3, Insightful)
...those of us with a very early Slackware box (which came with sendmail but no sendmail docs) didn't know that there was such a thing as the M4 files. We had some helpful comments in the
When we did find docs, it was just for the .cf file, not the installation-and-regeneration docs. (Which didn't really exist then.)
I became very good at editing sendmail.cf, and then came the day, years later, when I had to do it from absolute scratch, and downloaded the full tarball for the first time, and discovered the installation docs, which pointed me to the M4 files. Then I gave up in disgust and found qmail.
Having done my own rewriting rulesets, I became acutely aware of what's involved in processing an email. The knowledge gained helped me figure out qmail, in spite of its craptacular documentation.