[NCLUG] New School Servers

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Sat, Sep 01, 2001 at 10:56:14AM -0600, quent at pobox.com wrote:
>ProFTPD is highly secure (so far) and uses an Apache style config file.

ProFTPd has some pretty nice features, but I wouldn't call it highly
secure.  It's had a number of vulnerabilities, and for most of the last
year had serious bugs in it that you had to pull the CVS version for...
They hadn't made a release of it for months and had show-stoppers that the
CVS tree addressed...  It seems to frequently be hit by the same
vulnerabilities as wu-ftpd, so I think they share some code...

>I've been favoring Postgres over MySQL, since it's much more robust and

MySQL has been making a lot of progress over the last year, so it's
probably better now.  The more I've used it, the less I like it though.  A
couple of months ago I had to delete a bunch of historic data from an
accounting table, and MySQL locked the entire table while deleting these
records.  Locking the table for 90 minutes while it deletes stuff isn't
kosher...

The only thing in Postgres that I've found that locks a table is running an
optimize on it -- not suprisingly.

>install. Obviously for some uses MySQL rocks, since Slashdot runs on it.

MySQL now has transactions...  The stories from the sourceforge folks about
their testing between MySQL and Postgres doesn't paint a flattering picture
for MySQL -- even on heavily read-oriented databases (which MySQL has
traditionally been thought to be much faster on).

I've switched to djbdns for caching servers because I found it cured some
ills I was having with BIND.  Mostly in Netscape where pages weren't
loading the first time because it couldn't find the server.  I'd like to
convert everything over to using djbdns, but it doesn't really operate well
with BIND servers, so it would really be most useful where you control the
primary and secondary DNS.

For e-mail, I'm pretty happy with QMail.  Postfix is cool, but I din't
think it's cool enough that I need to switch.  I tried to switch a couple
of years ago, but Postfix wasn't mature enough at that time.

Combine that with vpopmail to handling virutal domains without having user
logins on the box...

>There is no alternative to Apache for serving web pages!

I don't know...  There are almost TOO MANY alternatives.  ;-)  Tux being a
good one if you run a high-traffic site, and webware being interesting if
you do a lot of dynamic stuff.  ;-)

Sean
-- 
 /home is where your .heart is.  -- Sean Reifschneider, 1999
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com - Linux Consulting since 1995. Qmail, KRUD, Firewalls, Python