Hi, On Mon, 22 Mar 2004, Chris Barnes wrote:
> Grant Baxter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I'm planning on setting up a mail server so I only have one SA > > installation to maintain instead of three. > > > > I've used Windows only for the past twenty or so years. I've never > > touched any Unix variant, so I would like some recommendations for the > > easiest Unix variant to set up and get running as a mail server with > > SA (including all the pieces parts I need, if you feel like it). > > > > I don't want to need to learn Unix to set this mail server up. > > That's kind of like saying you would like to buy a car (for the first > time), but don't want to learn how to drive, put gas in, or change the > oil. > > You might be able to make the initial purchase (install the OS) and > maybe even drive it for a few weeks (get the mail system up and > running). But sooner or later, you're going to have a problem which > will require you to open the hood.... I think the least disruptive learning path would be to start with one of the unix environments that work within Windows, either Cygwin (free, from Red Hat) or Windows Services for Unix (aka SFU, aka Interix, from Microsoft, "free" with Passport account.) Cygwin gives the user more choice out-of-the-box, and is fairly linux-y, which is to say more friendly towards novices. SFU is more BSD-ish and is aimed more at people who already know what they're doing. SFU has tighter integration with Windows but installing (say) ssh or a decent shell is neither easy nor obvious[1]. I'm currently running pop3proxy using both SpamAssassin and DCC under Cygwin on Win2K; its fairly stable and effective. I imagine that SFU would be able to do the job just as well. If you have plenty of disk space and a fast connection, both are reasonable and non-destructive ways of noodling around with a Unixy environment under Windows. The big advantage is the you can use both Windows and Cygwin/SFU concurrently - no need to dual-boot or manually switch environments. Beyond that, one might try a 'live' CD distribution like Knoppix (http://www.knoppix.org/) or SuSE's live-eval (http://www.suse.com/us/private/download/suse_linux/) I haven't used one in a long while but IIRC both boot from CD into a fully functional linux environment and store nothing to disk. In all cases, Google is your friend. hth, -- Bob [1] I'm more in the Solaris/Linux camp than the *BSD camp so that's probably my personal familiarity and bias showing through. I view ksh as a curiosity and csh as an abomination though I used them both quite regularly long, long ago...
