On Thu, 2003-06-19 at 15:21, Stephen Bannasch wrote: > I have a question for the group. How much work is it to install and maintain a > mailhost integrated with spam assassin for a company of about 40 employees. We have > experience with sendmail and linux.
I maintain 4 separate installations of spamassassin, one for a national charity, 2 for local businesses, and one for myself and friends, serving about 500 users in total. All use sendmail, mailscanner, sophos and/or f-prot, and spamassassin. > My IT guy gives the following estimate. He's comparing this with the administrative > cost for installing and running PureMessage. > > >-- Time estimates for an open source solution: > > -- 60+ hours to setup and test sendmail/anti-virus/RBL/anti-spam > >software from source. Everyone's going to say no way to 60 hours, I'm going to be different and say possibly, but probably not. The question really depends on how you intend to configure your servers. Are you referring to a simple single mailserver or something more complex with distributed mx's? If that includes reading the source and gaining a good understanding of how each piece works, alone and in relation to each other, in order to perform a complex installation across multiple mailservers, then 60 hours is not unreasonable. If you are just compiling and plugging together a simple straightforward single mailserver installation, 6 to 12 hours would be more realistic. > > -- 8 hours every month to verify that things are working and up to date 5 minutes a day here, or up to 15 minutes if I feel a need to re-tune a rule. anything beyond 15 minutes is because I'm 'playing' > > -- 8 hours every month to upgrade software (sendmail/RBL/virus/spam, all > >different) 8 hours to do what with it? Once you have your installation worked out, documented, and settled in, you should be able to remove and reinstall the whole thing in under 6 hours. The software does not need updating that often anyway, 30 mins to 3 hours would be a more realistic figure. > > -- 8 hours of down time every month while working and testing Hell no! 8 hours downtime is ridiculous. The only time you should ever see 8 hours downtime on anything is if the hardware catches fire! Excluding my home installation (because it gets experimented with too much) I have a 2 month cumulative down time under 1 minute. Swapping over to an upgraded daemon or program takes a second or two at most. In the very worst case you may delay a piece of mail by an hour or two. -- Yorkshire Dave ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: INetU Attention Web Developers & Consultants: Become An INetU Hosting Partner. Refer Dedicated Servers. We Manage Them. You Get 10% Monthly Commission! INetU Dedicated Managed Hosting http://www.inetu.net/partner/index.php _______________________________________________ Spamassassin-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk
