Re: Honesty about some exim mistakes

Virtual domains are a big concern to me..I may be brand new at this but I'm
stuck with the task and I need an enterprise-size mail server.
cpanel: http://www.cpanel.net/ is used for site config and mgmt
plesk: server mgmt for web hosting. think webmin, but bigger.


I think my greatest hate of exim-config thus far has actually been my lack
of experience with DEBCONF, and thus all the debconf replacements in the
otherwise easy to read config.
It should also be noted that the multi-file config is more like "The Debian
Way" tm
As you can see with apache, includes of directories of files is easier for
dropping in a new section and version managing an existing config. I do this
also!

On 3/28/06, listrcv <listrcv@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Greg Folkert wrote:

If you do a bit of reading, you'll see that the multi-config files setup
is very flexible.

It might be flexible, but it's utterly hard to get and to maintain an
overview of what is actually being configured. I didn't manage to find
that out, and getting to the configuration you want becomes impossible.

It's not only the splitting of the configuration across a multitude of
files, but using macros and/or replacements within the actual
configuration file created thereof makes it totally unreadable.

Exim becomes like sendmail with this :( It's a very big mistake to do it
that way in the first place.

It has made it so I can use Exim4 with C-Panel and
Plesk, rather than <shudder> the default. Yes, I have a heavily invested
time into it... but it works and I don't care.

What are c-panel and plesk?

I have also invested a lot of time into configuring mail servers. Many
years ago I kicked sendmail because it's not configurable and switched
to qmail on Suse distributions. When switching to Debian, Exim was
proposed as the default MTA, and I decided to give it a try. I found out
that Exim is just great because it's easy to configure and has lots of
nice features. But later, a switch from Exim3 to Exim4 was made (which
was overdue), and Debain-Exim4 started out with the automagic
configuration. I had more than enough trouble to get the simplest setup
with that on my system at home, and I still don't have the functionality
I had before yet because I gave up on the sucking autoconfig and haven't
had time to get it anew yet. Recently, I had to renew our company mail
server, and it was obvious that I wont be able to set things up with the
autoconfig. So I just started with the example config provided along the
docs, and it became very easy to get to the required setup within a few
minutes. All I had to learn about is new features like ACLs and other
small changes to the config options. There's no way to get that with the
autoconfig, and anything you get out of it is an unreadable config file
that _might_ do what it should, but you won't know because you can't
read it. So I keep saying the autoconfig sucks.

Fortunately, you don't have to use it if you don't want to, and if it's
helpful for others, than it is a good thing.

Just think how nice it would be to be able to drop a template file into
a directory for a domain (virtual) and then allow the owner to have
control over it through a svn merge. So that it can be reverted.

It'd be hell to do that with the single config.

Hm, I have never dealt with virtual domains, so I can't think about it.
I just keep hoping that we won't get forced to use the autoconfig at
some time.

And I can only recommend not to use it because it makes things much more
difficult once you want more than the standard options you are provided
with when setting up a system. But if you don't want more than that, you
won't ask here :)


GH


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