Re: [opensuse] Getting Rid of postfix and exim on my laptop

Ruben Safir said the following on 10/23/2008 07:46 PM:

Every SuSE Desktop host needs a SMTP and the port open? No, obviously
they don't.
Ah, yes they do


Oh no they DON'T and if an OS in my enterprise had to has an SMTP
server on every desktop I'd had the security detail scrub every
damn machine until that OS was gone.

Damn right! It would put them out of compliance and probably cost a lot
in clean-up. It may even force their replacement by Microsoft Windows
system!

Per, you are being quite ridiculous and outrageous.

Hopefully, Per, you man that each machine need to run a mail forwarder
OR a local mail delivery agent (that has not SMTP capability)

Lets look at the root cause here.

Someone was foolish enough to claim that CRON hadn't changed in 40+
years, which is incorrect, but yes, CRON still has a legacy from 40
years ago. It was developed in the teletype era. Back then you might
have 30 or 40 users on a single PDP-11. I recall that well, and yes
those old 16 bit transistor technology could handle 40 simultaneous
users. No virtual memory, perhaps a total of 80G of disk. Good old
Bourne shell. No networking.

All mail was local, here was no SMTP.

What is key here is that the shell check your mail file in
/usr/spool/mail (there was no /var back in the 70s and 80s) to see if it
had changed. This made sense when you were running a TTY.
It still made sense in the 80s when I had a 'glass tty'.

Come the era of windows most people don't run shells. Yes there are
weird people like us greybeards who can't let go of the command line (or
paper tape, nine-tack or disk pack that take two strong me to load).
But most users are viewing the system though windows, and of those more
and more are staying within a few programs like the web browser and the
office tools.

These people would never see the notice from CRON.

If you look at how Microsoft windows works, and stop for a moment and
put your prejudices aside, 'cos a lot that product is well worked out
and makes a lot of sense and is very 'usable', notification is by one of
two things.

For the enterprise, there is the notification, sort-of-like syslog.
For the individual there is a notifier pop-up.

And for the individual there is not a whole lot of configuration options
turning things like LDAP, SMTP ... on and off. Yes, an enterprise
workstation might have a different version of Widnes with enterprise
outlook (which can't do POP/SMTP and *has* to talk to the enterprise
Exchange server), do authentication against an enterprise Active
Directory server and so forth. But Windows Home for the Windows "user"
has none of that. The "user" doesn't need to know.

Windows XP and Vista "Home Edition" have any facilities and one of them
is an event scheduler sort-of akin to CRON. (Squint hard.) Since
Microsoft Windows assumes you do not have a command line shell open, and
pretty much assumes you will do without it, all notification is by a
pop-up window. Can you say "event notifier"?

Now lets look at Linux. Lets look at an ordinary home user, perhaps a
'one laptop per child' child using Linux rather than Windows, or a
netbook purchaser who hasn't returned his netbook and swapped it for one
running Windows. He's probably been brainwashed by the GUI
environments of Microsoft or Apple and simply wont think of opening an
xterm window or hotkeying to a tty screen. So he'll never see a shell.
He doesn't expect the system to send out mail messages for errors, e
expects popups. The idea of the system needing to know his "internet"
mail address is going to make him suspicious. Identity theft?
Microsoft Windows never needed this...

So CRON sending notifications by email is inapproprite for an enterprice
setting where syslog is used to consolidate & monitor events, and
inappropriate for a home, SOHO or SMB "user" where a popup notifier is
the expectation.

Having CRON send mail is just soooo 1980s-ish.

BTDT and glad its long past. Lets let go of those old conceptions and
limitations.

--
I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.
--Albert Einstein
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