I've upgraded to CentOS 4.4 on a new 1U box and I need to finally clear some nagging questions and some new ones.

I posted the postgres already.

2. why do I want to choose postfix over sendmail? Postfix still has the user@domain issue along with local network looback issues. I know sendmail's overhead is a bit steeper but setting it up is essentially a breeze (except auth before sending mail, unless it's finally built in). And why the preference to var/spool/mail instead of home/domain/user/mail

This new install is also getting a cpu temp warning. How do I disable it or at least find the threshhold for the alarm? The bios shows it running at 78C.

I need to clear these right away as moving the nameservers off the slackware machines is becoming a bit more of a challenge than expected. ( they've been running since 2001 ;-)

Thanks,
Dan

what is this user@domain issue? Please read the recent thread Configuring Virtualmin to work with Postfix.

I made a user with the @ symbol as their user name and two users were created. I'm wondering if jamie/joe made this to accomodate this issue you're talking about.

one user was username.domainname
the other was username@domainname.com
Both have the same UID - which I'm not really understanding how/why.

thanks, /johnford

Ya, that's part of the problem along with spamassassin and the fact that all the users are currently on sendmail and most have a senmail preference. Frankly, I would rather go with qmail with less overhead and the ability to facilitate more users. Postfix seems to have loopback issues, I'm assuming, when other network boxes are running sendmail. Eveytime I try to use it the mail loops back from the primary nameserver and I don't have a good reason to try to fix that. I just use sendmail.

it works... I can pick up mail by logging in with username@domainname.com to pop3 and send through the smtp with the same username login.

You can also login with port 995 use ssl for pop3 to pick up mail.

Hey Dan,

Postfix just happens to be my preference. The configuration file is sane, it has an astoundingly good security history (which, to be fair, sendmail has been pretty darned good for the past several years), and includes all of the features you need right out of the box. If you're comfortable with Sendmail, use it. I just don't find it very nice to work with...cryptic logging, even more cryptic configuration files, and a lot of weird cantankerous corner cases.

I'd still pick sendmail over qmail...which is effectively unmaintained and has been for several years. qmail itself is great, but to get modern functionality, you have to apply a half dozen third party patches, that may or may not be written with djb's attention to detail and security. It's just not something I'd want to use on a production server.

The user@domain issue isn't really something we can blame on Postfix...the capability was removed from Postfix because it can lead to unintended side effects when forwarding and relaying through other servers. In effect, Wietse, by removing the capability, was saying, "There's no good way to handle this problem. Thus, I'm not going to allow it to exist on servers that run my software." And we do actually avoid it with our workaround...as far as the MTA is concerned. The issue is @ in the username...not the fact that Postfix refuses to deal with them. But, if you use Virtualmin with Postfix, you can have your cake and eat it too (with the mild annoyance of having two users in passwd for every mailbox).


And why the preference to var/spool/mail instead of home/domain/user/mail

Actually, we don't care where you put your mail, but in Virtualmin Professional we've chosen Maildir spools in /home/domain/homes/user/Maildir. I think that's the best choice for most folks.