> Speaking as a Macintosh groupie, this has been nagging at me. Apple runs
> all its lists out of a UNIX box(es), MLM is majordomo, MTA is sendmail and
> you are paid to administrate this. Is that correct?
Correct. public.lists.apple.com is mine. It's a very high volume site.
today, I could probably do most of the actual delivery off of LetterRip
pro, but at the time I designed the system, it was still an early
release and I wasn't convinced we had the horsepower to do it (and the
way my system is growing, I'm going to outgrow my current box...).
Beyond that it does a lot more than just majordomo. There's a big piece
of procmail around it doing specialized functions, plus tools (like
htdig and mhonarc) to handle some archiving and searching, plus ftp,
plus....
It's a matter of appropriate tools. Apple doesn't run it's accounts
payable or general ledger on Macs, either, because those require more
horsepower. For an operation the size I'm running, Unix makes sense.
I've got ~175 lists, some as large as 50,000 subscribers, and a lot of
extra stuff going on.
As a fellow Mac groupie, I'd love to stuff everything on Macs. In fact,
I'm in process of moving some functions from the Unix box to Macs
because technologies have matured enough to warrant it (check back in
September. I should have things up by then). But design decisions made
2 years ago and 14 months in development just don't change overnight.
And it's more important for things to WORK than for the platform to be
politically correct. I use Macs wherever I can, but sometimes, other
things are better tools.
--
Chuq Von Rospach (Hockey fan? <http://www.plaidworks.com/hockey/>)
Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
<http://www.plaidworks.com/> + <http://www.lists.apple.com/>
