On Wed, May 08, 2002 at 11:49:16PM -0500, Glen Lee Edwards wrote: [some quotes re-arranged for better cohesiveness of replies] | dman writes: | >On Wed, May 08, 2002 at 07:09:13PM -0500, Glen Lee Edwards wrote:
| >(I couldn't get my 8MB clunker to boot from a cd and didn't have any
| >floppies handy so I stuffed the hd in a bigger machine for the
| >install. Be aware that with only 8MB RAM package updates and many
| >other operations cause lots of thrashing. 16MB would be much better
| >:-)).
|
| That's what I call resourceful. I'd have put Windows 95 back in it and then
| used it for target practice.
:-).
The machine had no cd drive; I borrowed the (2x) sony drive and the
corresponding sound blaster controller card from my dad's old machine.
The BIOS wouldn't boot it, and I couldn't figure out the DOS driver to
allow using loadlin. I had stolen the floppy drive from it because I
was too cheap to buy one for my new machine (that I assembled) and
didn't have any installer floppies handy (I'm not sure if I had a NIC
in the machine at the time either). It served masquerading for the
phone line for a while until we got DSL. I didn't want to buy another
ISA NIC so I moved the masq onto my desktop machine. When I moved to
Illinois a few months ago (co-op job with International Teams, check
it out at www.iteams.org) I revived the machine to handle the firewall
and masquerading. It was capable of upgrading from potato to woody,
but I got tired of the thrashing so I put the drive into my modern
machine (again) and did the upgrade there and then moved it back.
It's been running great and even serves as my secondary MX. (well, I
half-killed it when I forgot to include load-limiting options in my
exim configuration and the kernel started killing processes. I
couldn't log in because sshd was dead; and when I went home even login
was dead! It still managed the routing though :-))
| >As far as availability and findability goes, RH has sendmail as the
| >only MTA. Debian has sendmail, exim, postfix, ssmtp, and I'm sure
| >there are others as well. The same goes for many other tools. When I
| >made the switch from RH to Debian I was amazed to find included on the
| >cd many little-known programs I had failed to compile on my RH system.
|
| I need one that's secure and gives you real control over it. I've been using
| Sendmail. But I've been receiving mail from spammers that, according to the
| message ID, are originating from my own box. I'm guessing that they're either
| sending mail directly from their home system to my Sendmail program, using it
as
| the MTA, which they aren't supposed to be able to do (relaying denied is set),
| or they've somehow hacked me and are originating spam mail from my computer.
I
| need an MTA that gives me more control over the mail in my system, including
the
| ability to have copies of all mail that originates in my system sent to me by
| the MTA.
Sendmail is wholly under your control -- I've heard that it's
configuration language is Turing complete. For the same reason it's
horrid to configure and would be a good enough reason to try linuxconf
:-). Beware -- linuxconf doesn't properly configure sendmail on
debian! Use exim instead, it's much easier to configure.
| >| I need to run servers on two 16 Meg RAM boxes - DNS and mail mainly.
| >
| >I recommend running spamassassin with your mail service. It won't
| >take kindly to low memory (it uses around 8-9MB on my machine) though
| >some people run it on a 486 with 32MB RAM. (I think those are
| >terminal machines with relatively low volumes of mail) You can have
| >'spamd' running on a different machine than your MTA, though.
|
| I'll try it and see how it handles it. I don't think it'll be a problem. The
| box I need to run it on only has 16 Meg RAM, but currently Sendmail is using
0%
| of the processor and 2.05% of memory, while Named is using 0% of the processor
| and 11.72% of memory.
For a no-source-changes configuration see these docs :
http://dman.ddts.net/~dman/config_docs/exim3_spamassassin.html
The downside of that technique is each message is handled by exim
twice.
If you want to compile exim yourself, then this is a neat new method :
http://marc.merlins.org/linux/exim/sa.html
It requires exim 4 (which isn't yet packaged for debian because the
maintainer didn't want to try and introduce a major incompatible
change right before woody's release) and due to the newness of the
"local scan" api requires recompilation of exim any time you change
the local_scan. Marc has his own debian packages of exim4+sa on that
site too.
I'm currently using Marc's local_scan, which is really slick!
| >| (I'm assuming there are a few current or ex-Red Hat users here)?
| >
| >Yep. RH 7.0 pushed me over the edge (I only started with 5.2 which
| >didn't like my vid. card and then 6.1).
|
| I started with 5.2 also. Actually I tried Slackware first. That was a
| nightmare. How'd I know they'd expect me to keep a copy of my monitor refresh
| rates lying around? I then tried Red Hat. It installed, so I've remain
| unconditionally loyal to it since. Heh, one upgrade from 6.1 to 6.2 literally
| took 6 days.
I re-installed on each upgrade (5.2->6.1 , 6.1->7.0) mainly because I
wanted to reorganize my partitions. I learned that my 6.1 system had
newer stuff than 7.0 shipped with, had stuff 7.0 didn't have, and 7.x
used a really broken compiler. That's what prompted me to look
around.
| >| Does Debian support the old Sound Blaster Pro CDRoms (sbpcd module)?
| >
| >It's in the kernel source and image packages. I presume it works :-).
| >(that's a kernel thing, really, and all distros should be the same wrt
| >it)
|
| Good. I don't know what if any tweaking of the kernel different packagers do.
| Thought I'd better ask.
Good reason ;-).
| >| How well does FVWM run on Debian systems? I currently build FVWM
| >| rpms for Red Hat.
| >
| >I use sawfish but I have fvwm installed just in case something goes
| >wack with sawfish. It runs, but I can't speak for how "well" because
| >I don't usually use it.
|
| I've spent way to much time personalizing FVWM to give it up. I'll
occasionally
| use KDE just for the variety, but I have so may keyboard customizations and
| mouse shortcuts designed into FVWM that I quickly get frustrated when I try
| something else.
I understand what you're saying. I don't use fvwm2 enough, nor have I
really cusomized it, so I can't speak to how *well* it runs, but I can
say that it's there :-). At school I use fvwm2 because it's
lighterweight than KDE and sawfish isn't available (and I had trouble
building it (libraries not found) -- I'm just a puny user on a
solaris/sparc system).
| I found that I can run FVWM on a remote box using X-forwarding to a
| better box on the LAN and get acceptable performance as long as I
| don't use high graphics programs, such as gimp or a graphics web
| browser.
I've found it better to run the window manager, etc, on the local
(modern) machine and use the X forwarding simply for the apps. I
don't run the window manager on the remote machine. (actually, I did
that a few times at school, and really felt the limitations of the
upstream side of the dsl line)
-D
--
The way of a fool seems right to him,
but a wise man listens to advice.
Proverbs 12:15
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