Re: (OT) SMTP: OBSD <-> Win2000

[Hal Snyder <hal@vailsys.com>]

> On Sun, Jan 14, 2001 at 01:24:31PM -0300, Pablo Bucich wrote:

>> I'm working in a banking related company. I must implement an SMTP
>> server in our DMZ (pop3 server is inside). I want OBSD but MS
>> people is offering the great advantages of MS Windows 2000 Advanced
>> Server. I KNOW who is better for that, but I must give some
>> concrete proofs.

My info is over a year old - for reason, see below. But I worked for a
year as net admin where CEO decided to toss sendmail + some POP server
in favor of Exchange. We had a single-CPU 333 MHz BSD system handling
outgoing web and email for 80 users plus corporate web and FTP site
and DNS; load average rarely got above 0.04. (At the time, the
perimeter server was FreeBSD because I didn't know about OpenBSD;
later, we introduced OpenBSD for NFS servers.)

Update your resumé. If you lose, you want to go to a BSD shop or you
will go crazy. When they switched to Exchange Server, my days were
filled watching PCs reboot and searching the MS Knowledge Base -
learned very little real comp sci on the job; last straw was when
employer went gung ho for ClearCase and I moved on.

1. Exchange Server site org is tightly bound to DNS so you have to
design email and DNS domains at same time, change them at same time.
This makes scaling an Exchange shop very messy.

2. Changing Organization name and other trivial settings in Exchange
Server = reinstall.

3. No native backup of individual mailboxes. There was an MS
Knowledge Base item saying that the way to recover a mailbox from
backup is to build another exchange server, restore full mail database
from backup, then have user log onto that and pick up lost mail.

4. Win32 OSes still have much of single-user, GUI-only,
reboot-whenever-somthing-looks-fishy legacy - it is nowhere near as
easy, nor as fast as OpenBSD, to log in remotely, run diagnostic
programs, make changes without taking down the system, etc.

5. Installing Exchange Server on an existing server was a quagmire of
nested and conflicting dependencies on different versions of IIS,
service packs, et al.