[TUHS] Cool talk on Unix and Sendmail history, by Eric Allman

[TUHS] Cool talk on Unix and Sendmail history, by Eric Allman

[Rich Morin]

Lessons Learned from Sendmail
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re1MAO6jOLE

-r

[TUHS] Re: Cool talk on Unix and Sendmail history, by Eric Allman

[Grant Taylor via TUHS]

On 7/21/23 1:53 PM, Rich Morin wrote:
> Lessons Learned from Sendmail
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re1MAO6jOLE

Thank you for sharing that video Rich.

The credits are finishing now.

A surprising amount of Eric's talk resonated with me.  I find it 
entertaining that he and I are doing strikingly similar things with 
email, both MTA and MUA, for seemingly similar reasons.

Thank you again.



Grant. . . .

[TUHS] Re: Cool talk on Unix and Sendmail history, by Eric Allman

[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, Jul 21, 2023 at 05:14:57PM -0500, Grant Taylor via TUHS wrote:
> On 7/21/23 1:53???PM, Rich Morin wrote:
> >Lessons Learned from Sendmail
> >https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re1MAO6jOLE
> 
> Thank you for sharing that video Rich.
> 
> The credits are finishing now.
> 
> A surprising amount of Eric's talk resonated with me.  I find it
> entertaining that he and I are doing strikingly similar things with email,
> both MTA and MUA, for seemingly similar reasons.
> 
> Thank you again.

I think it was pre-COVID but I had a gathering of systems people at my
place in the Santa Cruz mountains and Kirk and Eric were there.  I ended
up talking to Eric for quite a while and what went through my mind was
"This is so pleasant, I'd hire this guy or happily work for this guy.
He gets C like I do and likes it like I do".  It really was super 
pleasant to realize I'm not the last guy who wants to use C for 
serious work.

I suspect we're dinosaurs but we're cut from the same clothe dinosaurs.

A few pics here, not up to my usual level but whatever:

http://mcvoy.com/lm/2019-bsd-bbq/
-- 
---
Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

[TUHS] Re: Cool talk on Unix and Sendmail history, by Eric Allman

[Grant Taylor via TUHS]

On 7/21/23 5:30 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> It really was super pleasant to realize I'm not the last guy who 
> wants to use C for serious work.

I thought the same thing about m4.

I still like m4.

I've used m4 for more than trivial things within the last few years.

> I suspect we're dinosaurs but we're cut from the same clothe dinosaurs.

:-)



Grant. . . .

[TUHS] Re: Cool talk on Unix and Sendmail history, by Eric Allman

[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, Jul 21, 2023 at 05:33:11PM -0500, Grant Taylor via TUHS wrote:
> 
> On 7/21/23 5:30???PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> >It really was super pleasant to realize I'm not the last guy who wants to
> >use C for serious work.
> 
> I thought the same thing about m4.
> 
> I still like m4.
> 
> I've used m4 for more than trivial things within the last few years.
> 
> >I suspect we're dinosaurs but we're cut from the same clothe dinosaurs.

I think you get good at using C, and/or m4, and at a certain point it is
easier to write good code in that than start over in a different set of
tools.

My older son is learning CS and I told him that C is a lot like a
sports car on a twisty mountain road that has no guard rails.  If
you are someone who wants to be on your phone in the car, you are
gonna have a bad time.  On the other hand, if you are an expert 
driver, it's a lot of fun.

Kids these days, all they want is guard rails :)

--lm

[TUHS] Re: Cool talk on Unix and Sendmail history, by Eric Allman

[Steve Nickolas]

On Fri, 21 Jul 2023, Larry McVoy wrote:

> I think it was pre-COVID but I had a gathering of systems people at my
> place in the Santa Cruz mountains and Kirk and Eric were there.  I ended
> up talking to Eric for quite a while and what went through my mind was
> "This is so pleasant, I'd hire this guy or happily work for this guy.
> He gets C like I do and likes it like I do".  It really was super
> pleasant to realize I'm not the last guy who wants to use C for
> serious work.
>
> I suspect we're dinosaurs but we're cut from the same clothe dinosaurs.
>
> A few pics here, not up to my usual level but whatever:
>
> http://mcvoy.com/lm/2019-bsd-bbq/

I feel like C is one of the only languages worth using for serious code.

Most of my code is still C.

-uso.

[TUHS] Re: Cool talk on Unix and Sendmail history, by Eric Allman

[segaloco via TUHS]

> A few pics here, not up to my usual level but whatever:
> 
> http://mcvoy.com/lm/2019-bsd-bbq/

Hah, that reminds me of an implementation trip I was on once.  They put our "classroom" back in an old warehouse full of all sorts of junk.  Well, one particular week they were doing a bunch of loading/unloading and there was frequently a forklift, keys and all, parked there in this large, tempting warehouse, in the dead of winter in BFE Pennsylvania.  Nothing was done that violated company policy, but then again, can't violate a company policy that doesn't exist in writing :)

Can't say I've ever gotten any projects at work to bite on C, but I've had some moderate success reducing most of our boilerplate templates into m4 macros...just in time for a lull in new work.  We've got a new project starting soon though that I'm excited to finally use it with, maybe I'll finally convert someone else at work to using some UNIX tools.

- Matt G.

[TUHS] Re: Cool talk on Unix and Sendmail history, by Eric Allman

[Jon Forrest]

On 7/21/2023 3:30 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:

> I think it was pre-COVID but I had a gathering of systems people at my
> place in the Santa Cruz mountains and Kirk and Eric were there.  I ended
> up talking to Eric for quite a while and what went through my mind was
> "This is so pleasant, I'd hire this guy or happily work for this guy.

I've had the pleasure and honor of working with and for Eric several
times in my career. He's one of the best programmers I've ever seen.

Jon

[TUHS] Re: Cool talk on Unix and Sendmail history, by Eric Allman

[John Cowan]

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On Fri, Jul 21, 2023 at 7:39 PM Steve Nickolas <usotsuki@buric.co> wrote:


> I feel like C is one of the only languages worth using for serious code.
>

Spinach!  The only language suitable or serious code is Fortran 66, where
A+I is a compiler error.

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[TUHS] Re: Cool talk on Unix and Sendmail history, by Eric Allman

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Larry McVoy wrote:
> I'm not the last guy who wants to use C for serious work.

I'm using many diffent languages for many things.  But when I write
stuff that I'm humbly HOPING will be useful, say, 30 years from now, I
pick C.  It seems to me it's likely it will stick around, close to its
current form, a long time from now.  I don't think I could make that bet
on other languages that are popular now, either due to the language
itself being in flux, or its libraries, ecosystem, etc.

[TUHS] Re: Cool talk on Unix and Sendmail history, by Eric Allman

[Rich Salz]

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He says he wraps everything he uses in the standard library; "this tends to
make my code idiosyncratic."  At some Usenix, someone once summed it up to
me as "It is the most beautiful code that is completely unmodifiable."
Seemed appropriate.  (Compare to procmail, where the quote was "seen the
source? Gaah, my eyes are melting.")

I enjoyed watching this, thanks. I agree with the other comment "what,
nothing about security?" Sendmail did enable the first Internet worm :)

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[TUHS] Re: Cool talk on Unix and Sendmail history, by Eric Allman

[Warner Losh]

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On Sat, Jul 22, 2023, 8:54 AM Rich Salz <rich.salz@gmail.com> wrote:

> He says he wraps everything he uses in the standard library; "this tends
> to make my code idiosyncratic."  At some Usenix, someone once summed it up
> to me as "It is the most beautiful code that is completely unmodifiable."
> Seemed appropriate.  (Compare to procmail, where the quote was "seen the
> source? Gaah, my eyes are melting.")
>

Back in the 80s I looked at sendmail.. lots of things like strcpy written
inline. It was a mess in some ways, but ran more slowly if you cleaned all
that stuff up. It was decently well done, but had also clearly grown well
beyond its original framing...

The thing is... you don't need wrappers for standard calls. You just need
portable implementations of them for the times they are missing or broken.

I enjoyed watching this, thanks. I agree with the other comment "what,
> nothing about security?" Sendmail did enable the first Internet worm :)
>

Some of that was the times: almost nothing cared about security in a world
full of active attackers... having already forgotten the lessons of the
early v5 deployments exposing unix to lots of bored college students that
needed to do something and quickly found holes in unix's protections..
though known at the time, the stack smash wasn't believed generally to be a
severe threat. Even after the eorm, it was 10 years later openbsd started
its wide spread effort to fix them...

Gets() was the real problem that leD to the worm. The insecurity was baked
into the APIs until the 90s... and many insecure APIs weren't removed until
the last decade.

Warner

>

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[TUHS] Re: Cool talk on Unix and Sendmail history, by Eric Allman

[Arrigo Triulzi via TUHS]

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On 22 Jul 2023, at 17:25, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:
> having already forgotten the lessons of the early v5 deployments exposing unix to lots of bored college students that needed to do something and quickly found holes in unix's protections.. 

As a curious young lad I was very pleased that the concept of a “secure” tty wasn’t around when I “bruteforced” my first root password over my father’s TYY.

Arrigo 

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[TUHS] Re: Cool talk on Unix and Sendmail history, by Eric Allman

[Dave Horsfall]

On Sat, 22 Jul 2023, Rich Salz wrote:

> (Compare to procmail, where the quote was "seen the source? Gaah, my 
> eyes are melting.")

The Procmail source is so bad that even the author has abandoned it; it's
likely to be riddled with security holes too, so you'd be nuts to use it.

> I enjoyed watching this, thanks. I agree with the other comment "what, 
> nothing about security?" Sendmail did enable the first Internet worm :)

Like C, Sendmail was not really designed with secure coding in mind.

-- Dave