Re: [9fans] So What is P9 good for.....

[Lucio De Re <lucio@proxima.alt.za>]

On Mon, Feb 17, 2003 at 03:32:49AM -0800, Geoff Collyer wrote:
>
> It's twenty years on, and lunix distributions still include sendmail
> and BIND, despite their size, slowness, complexity, buginess, painful
> configuration files and long history of security bugs, usually due to
> buffer overruns.  There are certainly plausible alternatives to

... and bash.  What are you suggesting?  I run sendmail by choice,
even direct requests to move on to qmail or postfix I meet with a
"as long as someone else does the administration and maintenance".
Do I really need to move out of my comfort zone?

Well, I _am_ here to learn, but I don't have the confidence to move
away yet.  Incidental, perhaps, but I'm a lot more fearful of MS
Exchange.  I seldom look at Sendmail sources, but there's definitely
some value in their availability.  I suspect that applies to others in
the lunix fold.

> sendmail available.  I'm not sure about BIND, but I'd rather port dns
> and whatever machinery it needs to Unix than deal with BIND again.
> The stupidity of permitting (nay, encouraging) forward and reverse
> maps to differ is bad enough, but it nibbles at you, with
> manually-maintained zone serial numbers and trailings dots and just
> endless crap.  (Of course, the DNS itself won't win any beauty
> contests, but that's a harder problem.)
>
That's DNS, not BIND.  If the RFC demanded one-to-one relationships
between IPs and names, BIND would have been different indeed.  Or
are you suggesting that BIND's implementation of zones predates
the RFCs?

> What's wrong with these lunix people, are they stupid or something? ?

I guess so.  My take is that the _real_ choices are not as obvious
as they may be to an outsider.  For one, legacy _does_ exist and
has to be dealt with.  I have NetBSD installations, all of them to
be subsumed into a single server "real soon now" varying from 1.1
through 1.2.1, 1.3, 1.4.2, 1.5.2 to 1.6.  Upgrading is a real pain.
And Plan 9 has no upgrade path that is superior where it really
matters, namely in the configuration files.

Now imagine if I had to roll my own mail exchanger, DNS server and
other useful tools (web server, proxy, you name it).

I do note that on the NetBSD mailing list the sendmail vs postscript
debate is veering to taking both of those off the distribution,
replacing them with mini-sendmail (by Jef Poskanzer - if memory
serves and my spelling neurons are firing right).  So there is an
awareness that bigger is not better and that alternatives must be
sought.  But I suspect it is a groundswell movement: it needs the
background noise to increase, rather than have some shrill complaints
in the foreground.

I call it democracy, but of course in a techno forum that is usually
taken to mean sheepocracy.  The result is the same :-)

++L