Aaron Stone wrote:
..responsible sysadmin rant...
I do empathize with your situation, but I really must insist that this
behavior be fixed after being fully discussed on the mailing list and the
best solution found. You owe it to your customers to have tested to make
sure that your new system really would work as expected -- I accept fault
for having changed an expected behavior without realizing it / changing
the documentation to match, but I can't accept fault for you not having
tested DBMail in your environment before deploying it. Basically, this is
your emergency and not any else's.
I'm interested in finding the solution - rather than finding the person
to blame. I didn't flame *you* -
I expressed my "feelings" of helplessness and frustration that the -dev
conversation ran in circles and
came to rest at "well we really have a lot of other things to do, and
this will require a lot more thought"
about restoring basic functionality that was changed - by your statement
- without documentation or clear
notice. I don't honestly know if it was a documented or "notified in a
big way" change - only that I
didn't see or find or run across the info. I'm not interested in
pointing the finger, or fault, or blame. I'm asking
for simple assistance that doesn't require you to fix your code yet.
But you flame me as an irresponsible sysadmin who has created her own
emergency - when I wasn't looking
to blame anyone - just looking for a solution - and willing to have my
own programmers do it if you are
not ready to yet - if you would be so kind as to point out the file and
perhaps line number or some
reference where to make the change, that would be appreciated.
Naturally in a world of "a google" possible circumstances and
situations, there may be those you are
not envisioning: I have been running a test install of dbmail for about
4 months with a few closely monitored
domains of my own prior to putting other customers on the system. Why
forwards and aliases worked sometimes
and not others was a bit of a question - I don't know and you haven't
said when you made this change - but
I think that explicit aliases were required for address-like users in
the version I was using.
The discussion of whether dbmail is production ready and watching all
the other dbmail list group readers talking
about how they use dbmail with large user groups made me think I must
just be stupid about the
external forwards and other aliases, or I was using the experimental 2.x
etc.... prior to putting my production
customers on dbmail, I did upgrade to the latest, 2.02 and then shortly
to the 2.03 as advised by your site.
Although we had been planning to migrate to dbmail from a Windows
pop/IMAP "Ipswich Imail" for many
months, we were taking it slow and careful and planning out the move.
Unfortunately the Imail version we were
on prevented an upgrade from win2k SP3 to SP4... and for whatever reason
after years of reasonably reliable
operation, the machine shut itself down and the Windows partitions
within the RAID 5 container were
strangely inaccessible when turning it back on, even though NTLDR not
found error was there, Disk I/O error
00008001 would occur when attempting any repair or reinstall, and the
partitions were not visible to utility.
We recovered 100% of all data on the mail server from backups and RAID
5 data recovery using a nice
$40 program File Scavenger... absolutely no physical errors were found
on the drive either.
But recovery took time - and we made the decision to make our migration
to dbmail instantly at the moment it was
clear that the Windows server wasn't going to run again - rather than
repeat the dependence on Windows.
It was our last mail related Windows machine (2 sendmail gateways, a
dedicated postfix
outbound-only machine, a squirrelmail machine - the rest of our mail
servers were all Linux / freebsd already.)
We were prepared for the migration and it went very smoothly. I
dutifully created matching aliases for every user
imported. We had one large customer who elected to stay with the
ampersand delimiter for user names. At least
I can be grateful that *their* extra aliases work.
I have another suggestion that you might boldly emblazon something in
red on the dbmail website or in the dbmail.conf
file in the ldap, auto notification and auto reply area, stating that
these functions are not workable yet, there is not yet
any workable solution within dbmail for vacation replies, ldap doesn't
work, and notifications (I assume) are also a
way to create mail loops(?)
As open source volunteer developers, I appreciate that you have every
right to not have features done, I am just
making the suggestion that you make this blazingly clear on the website
and the dbmail.conf sections which sort of
appear as if they work, and are presently without warnings, such as "#
auto reply has no protection against mail loops".
It takes a lot of time and googling and archive studying and asking
to discover that these functions aren't workable at this time. I have
spent a lot of time trying and tracking down
possible vacation reply options - including a great LDAP one which
obviously I cannot use yet, as well as traditional
unix vacation programs I could pipe a dbmail alias to... but with the
new alias set up I'd have to choose between
the alias working or the user getting the mail... as well as trying to
fake the vacation program into thinking the user
exists and getting it to look at the right vacation message file. Old
references I found to possible patches are
dead links and I wrote the author... but not waiting for that... I press
on, in my irresponsible sysadmin way.
Sendmail is the MTA rather than postfix on the dbmail machine, and we
have specialized reasons for using
sendmail, and all of that portion is working very well as is. It would
be irresponsible of me to disturb it - and my
goal for my customers is Stability and Productivity.
I will study your postfix links to see if they give me any additional
ideas. However, as someone who daily writes
IF THEN ELSE and SQL stuff - in my limited way - and have C and python
programmers available to me - I
would appreciate it if you'd just say --- file x, general area YYZ or
line number... to affect the user / alias logic
for adding to the delivery list. Or I can have them go hunting which is
much less preferable.
Thank you,
- April Lorenzen
..ok, back to the situation at hand...
If you are using Postfix as your MTA, you can have it do a lot of the
work:
http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html#virtual_alias_maps
http://www.postfix.org/VIRTUAL_README.html
Best of luck getting a stop-gap solution in place, and I'm glad that
you're on the mailing list helping to find a good solution. We'll get
there!
Aaron
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