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 I can't blame Dent for my slight confusion in the section on addresses and headers - having RFC822 superseded by RFC2822 was just a little too much coincidence for this particular "bear of little brain."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.
beats the hell outta sendmail... (Score:5, Interesting)
CB
I'm not trolling, really... (Score:4, Interesting)
(while Sendmail config file reminds raw binary, Postfix is all easy, understandable and well commented options)
Postfix shortcomings (Score:4, Interesting)
Good book, but even with Kyle's help I still can't get procmail working with postfix. Postfix has its own filtering mechanism, including spam filtering. It doesn't seem to allow 3rd party apps like procmail and spamassassin to play with it, though. I can't find info on Gogole either. Is anyone using procmail or spamassassin with postfix?
Re:it took you this long to switch from sendmail? (Score:3, Interesting)
No, you aren't. sendmail just works. Oh, and I
badly failed trying to configure postfix.
Re:I'm not trolling, really... (Score:1, Interesting)
I tend to make a ridiculous number of changes to the
Re:i stopped reading after i ran into this... (Score:3, Interesting)
Besides, remember that even those you consider to be stupid often have good advice. This is one of those instances. Postfix is wonderful. Simple, secure, fast, powerful, extensible... Weitze did an amazing job writing it. He was the guy who wrote TCPWrappers (back in the days before xinetd put some resonable security into inetd) and the origional network analysis tool Satan, so you know it's written with security in mind.
I've got it pushing 6-8 gigs of email a day in one install using pretty lame hardware (uniproc, 2 SCSI drives at RAID 1). We've loved it, and had some great success with it.
Re:i stopped reading after i ran into this... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I'm not trolling, really... (Score:1, Interesting)
Next book to buy (Score:2, Interesting)
M4 actually has some benefits (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not saying it is the best way, but there was a reason.
Re:Thank Apple for (Score:1, Interesting)
Dont get me wrong, I love BSD style licenses. They are very useful, but tend to be lacking in author compensation and stability of the platform when a commercial entity gets interested in it, i think.
Re:beats the hell outta sendmail... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Postfix shortcomings (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:i stopped reading after i ran into this... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd file that under "You all thought I was crazy, but who's laughing now?" I'm at the tail end of a migration of my own business from mostly Windows with one Mac and one Linux box, to a mix of OS X and Linux and a legacy Windows box... and lovin' it.
On the topic of Postfix, I switched from Sendmail (which I'd been tinkering with for a few years) to Postfix when I switched from RedHat to Mandrake, and found it mostly painless. The only problem was that Mandrake's default install of Apache and Postfix apparently left an open proxy (not relay) exploit enabled, and I was briefly sending out spam for some low-life.
Re:Thank Apple for (Score:2, Interesting)
Postfix rocks it (Score:1, Interesting)
Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's actually not a bad platform at all and can be quite reliable.
postfix instead of sendmail - that's a good thing (Score:4, Interesting)
I replaced sendmail wwith postfix on all my non-isiolated machines last year after the sendmail vulnerability-of-the-week treadmill got very old.
it was *really* simple to do.
postfix: the ultimate sendmail patch.
On the evil of colons in book titles (Score:2, Interesting)
I found the article referenced by Arts & Letters Daily [aldaily.com].
Re:Another Postfix book is coming soon (Score:2, Interesting)
*sigh* Humor impaired? (Score:4, Interesting)
And therefore, since the administration is so easy, you have plenty of time to read and review books.
See? He made a funny.
(Mind you, this is funny because it's true. If you'd said the same thing except about moving your servers from Windows NT 4 to Windows 2003 Advanced Server, he could have said the same thing, and it would've been funny because it was so outrageously false.)
-fred
Re:I'm not trolling, really... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a nice, well-written book. It just should have been "Learning Postfix." And then I would have known not to buy it.
"Practical mod_perl" is another misnamed book. It's really "Practical[ly everything you could ever need to know about running an Internet server that happens to have] mod_perl [on it.]" Heck, I bet it'll tell me how to run Postfix in the next chapter or so. In more depth than the Postfix book.
PostFix + MYSQL + Cyrus Rocks!!! (Score:2, Interesting)
Virtual users with mysql ROCK! Add a record in mysql,
and a couple folders on the server(via cron jobs that also check the MYSQL database) and voila!
I don't like to plug my business on slashdot, so I'll post anonymously, but this setup has worked wonderfully for a long while for my companies modest needs.
It is nice having virtual users. In fact my shared hosting servers can be run without any real system accounts for the end users., (I try to keep "advanced" accounts that have shell access on other servers...)
FTP users are all virtual too! (Pure FTP), even the DNS is mysql powered (PowerDNS). Make admin pretty easy, I just spend most of my time writing frontends to it...
ANyway POSTFIX is great by itself, but combined with some additional open source goodness and the sum totoal just rocks...
Re:editting sendmail.cf (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:About sendmail.cf (Score:2, Interesting)
Since sendmail may have been started with inetd on a slow machine, sendmail.cf was designed to be very fast to parse. How fast? A decade ago the parser could do millions of lines a second on fast hardware for the day. Thats not a major deal now but it did help on a pdp11 or an early vax.
Sendmail is not static and its still evolving. It was the 1st open source program that worked around insecure OS bugs and is the only major MTA that continues to do so.
A request for Wietse... (Score:4, Interesting)
In this day and age of DNS and MTAs synergizing [slashdot.org] to combat spam, it kind of makes some sense, doesn't it?
I use tinydns myself but the DJB way has also irked me. Which is why I turned to postfix after evaluating qmail long ago. sendmail's security problems and horrid config made it out of the question.
Kinda like BIND. Though the config isn't as bad as sendmail.cf (and tinydns's data file is about as bad), I'd like to see what Wietse would come up with...
-h3
Re:it took you this long to switch from sendmail? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:it took you this long to switch from sendmail? (Score:3, Interesting)
I found the most attractive features of Postfix were having to do far less security patches, and the fact that my MTAs used far less resources, necessitating fewer upgrades.
YMMV.
Paul