Fedora Core 2 wishlists

[Lamar Owen]

On Tuesday 09 December 2003 11:12 am, Michael K. Johnson wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 10:28:05AM -0500, Lamar Owen wrote:
> > [MailScanner] does, however, override the default
> > sendmail initscript, and starts both itself and sendmail in one
> > initscript.  This

> So every time you upgrade sendmail, your MailScanner config is hosed?
> Ick!  Or do they use triggers?  (worse)

Neither.  They are MTA-agnostic, and allow you to config which MTA you use in 
a /etc/sysconfig/MailScanner configuration file.  The startup for sendmail 
runs newaliases and a make pass through /etc/mail for you, then starts the 
incoming and outgoing sendmails. I could post their initscript if you would 
like, although it's available on the mailscanner website 
(www.mailscanner.info)

> > might be a minor stumblingblock.

> Well, it would certainly need to be fixed.

Since the newer sendmail initscripts start both sendmail and sm-client, this 
may be more fixable.  But they do not have you edit any sendmail config files 
at all.  The installation worked on my Fedora Core laptop as well and as 
smoothly as it did on the Aurora box which has a substantially earlier 
sendmail on it, so I don't think a sendmail upgrade would cause a problem.  
Looking over the MailScanner initscript, it doesn't appear to be a problem.

> > The way it's installer is distributed is
> > alos not the Regular Way, being a tarball of source RPMs of a bunch of

> That would all have to be regularized, which shouldn't be a big deal,
> if the whole point of that mess is to adapt it to the installation
> environment.  If that environment becomes a constant, then that whole
> rigamarole isn't useful.

It seems to just be a rebuild of the perl modules for your particular version 
of perl.  The rebuild worked fine on the SPARC (as long as I remembered to 
execute it with sparc32, that is: without the sparc32 invocation, there was a 
perl module went bellyup during the build, but that again doesn't cause a 
problem with intel users), and it worked fine on my Fedora laptop.  It does 
require some non-standard perl modules, but it is intelligent enough to check 
for modules that the base OS already has installed.

The modules it wants (and bundles as either source RPMS or, in one case, as a 
tarball)
perl-IO-stringy-2.108-1.src.rpm
perl-MailTools-1.50-1.src.rpm
ExtUtils-MakeMaker-6.05.tar.gz
perl-MIME-Base64-2.12-1.src.rpm
perl-MIME-tools-5.411-pl4.2.src.rpm
mailscanner-4.25-14.noarch.rpm
perl-Net-CIDR-0.08-2.src.rpm
perl-Convert-TNEF-0.17-1.src.rpm
perl-TimeDate-1.1301-2.src.rpm
perl-File-Spec-0.82-1.src.rpm
perl-File-Temp-0.12-1.src.rpm
perl-HTML-Parser-3.26-2.src.rpm
perl-HTML-Tagset-3.03-1.src.rpm

It includes the requisite tnef-1.1.4+sizelimit binary rpm, which I had to hunt 
down and rebuild for sparc.

The install.sh script even went as far as testing for the required MakeMaker 
version and updating it if the installed version was not high enough.

A similar wrapper for MIMEdefang would be welcome, since it's not the most 
straightforward installation.

The key things I found with MailScanner that were attractive to me was simply 
that it doesn't require milter, and it doesn't require procmail, nor does it 
require any change to any sendmail config.  With the older version of 
sendmail on the SPARC box (Aurora is, after all, based on Red Hat 7.3), I 
wasn't terribly excited about rebuilding a gaggle of things that would break 
the next time I did an up2date (which on Aurora accesses a current server for 
the Aurora project), or when I update to the next version of Aurora (which 
will be Fedora Core based).  

It does need an installed SpamAssassin (I have 2.55 on my SPARC box) and 
optionally an installed antivirus (it works with several packages, including 
the commercial Sophos, which I use at another site on RHL 8.0, and the OS 
ClamAV).

YMMV of course, since this is what I liked and it works for me in my 
particular instance... :-) (then again, I don't use Apache as my standard web 
server; I use AOLserver, which I've used and grown a codebase for for over 6 
years).
-- 
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu