[cobalt-users] Re: Re:Manual Sendmail.cf RBL SpamCop/ORDB

[Charlie Summers <charlie@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 10:39 PM -0400 8/25/02, Jeff Lasman is rumored to have typed:

> Are you being a bit condescending, Charlie?

   Aren't you being a bit full of yourself, too, pretending to be an average
Cobalt owner?

> Some of us have been
> successfully modifying sendmail.cf since the 1990s, or even before.

   No kidding. But then, if you have been doing such, you have no need for
his "instructions," and indeed are comfortable on "real" un*x boxes as well
and didn't buy your first and only Cobalt. His instructions were targeted at
the list subscribers, most of whom should NOT modify sendmail.cf without the
help of m4 (actually, most should not alter sendmail.cf WITH the aid of m4).
My guess is that you know one heckuva lot more about sendmail than Mr. Hung
(based on his post)...to suggest these "webmasters" who never ran anything
more complex than Windows before should dive into the guts of sendmail is
just scary.

> All this is just another example of how important it is for the
> administrator to know what s/he has been doing to modify his/her
> system(s).

   Which I have been arguing consistantly, loudly, and fruitlessly, even
pointing people to sendmail.org in my original m4 instructions hoping against
hope that someone would actually read enough to understand what they were
doing. That does NOT affect the simple truth that thanks to Cobalt/Sun's
marketing folks, people who buy these things think they need know little
about operating their servers except the GUI and rarely _bother_ to learn
anything else, and for those people, his suggestion was and, I maintain, IS,
irresponsible and dangerous. I don't give my four-year-old a sharp knife to
open her birthday presents, either.

> Frankly, and of course personally, I've never understood why I
> shouldn't.

   (*sigh*) Get over youself. You know d*mned well my comments were not
targeted to you, or the rest of the few on this list who are true sysadmins
with an understanding of the services and daemons they operate (I am not
including myself here, even though I _have_ been screwing around with
sendmail.cf since before m4 was an option; I'm still learning and have yet to
achieve guru status), but the many on this list who are appliance operators
(to blatently steal Thom's description). YOU are welcomed to modify anything
you want (so is Mr. Hung, for that matter); but it is just plain foolish to
suggest that the bulk of the Cobalt operators on this list should attempt
something so outside their experience range and ability level, on production
machines, no less!

   Heck, I was so nervous about even giving instructions on using something
as simple as m4 to alter sendmail's behavior that I spent considerable time
at the head of my post trying to scare people _away_ from doing it, figuring
those that didn't scare easily would learn something in the process...I also
was careful to show how to back-up in the event sendmail didn't properly
restart, as well as other fault-recovery suggestions throughout the posting
(which, I'm certain, Mr. Hung never read, since he referenced a post that
only partially _quoted_ it instead). He made it sound like a really good idea
for appliance operators who have no idea how sendmail works other than
clicking the sendmail button in the GUI to dive into manually modifying their
sendmail.cf files directly when they (and, I'm gambling, Mr. Hung, since he
admitted to have gleaned the changes he copied/pasted [without even tuning
off wordwrap in his SquirrelMail client] by using m4 in the first place) have
no idea what they're really applying. Sheesh.

         Charlie Summers