I was very impressed with "The Book of Postfix" by authors Ralf Hildebrandt
and Patrick Koetter and feel that it is an incredible Postfix reference. It
gives a great overall view of the operation and management of Postfix in an
extremely systematic and practical format. It flows in a logical manner, is
easy to follow and the authors did a great job of explaining topics with attention
paid to real world applications and how to avoid many of the associated pitfalls.
I am happy to have this reference in my collection.
The authors have taken the time to clearly answer the key questions that are
of real practical value. There is no excessive or superflous material here that,
although may good to know, won't divert attention from the topic of configuring
a solid MTA. The book is very well focused and the authors' hard work is obvious.
There are sections where someone else may have left good enough alone but they
went the extra mile to make sure that this book answered the important questions
fully.
"The Book of Postfix" starts with "A Postmaster's Primer To Email" and continues
through all of the key topics in a sensible progression so that even if you
are fairly new to administering email you are taught in a sequential manner
that promotes understanding. The comprehensive list of topics encompasses single
and multiple domain servers, dial-ups, SMTP restrictions, internal and external
content filters, mail gateways, SMTP proxy, SMTP authentication, SASL, LDAP,
SQL integration, Transport Layer Security, chroots, rate limiting, performance
tuning, and trouble shooting. It covers a good amount of ground.
The numerous "NOTE" and "CAUTION" sections provide great additional detail
to real world scenarious that I found extremely relevant and useful. For each
topic there is also an invaluable "TESTING" section so that you can verify for
yourself that you are in fact getting the expected behavior. The imperative
topic of security is always kept in mind in the confugrations and the accompanying
diagrams and flow charts do an excellent job of enhancing the text and providing
extra clarity.
Guardian
Digital Secure Mail Suite
Simplified Web-based management, encrypted connectivity and advanced authentication
features provide a highly scalable email platform capable of supporting
thousands of users and domains. Learn
More!
|
As a pratical test I followed the text to implment SMTP server side authentication
using Cyrus SASL2 libraries. Now this somewhat complex topic has consistently
haunted many in the Postfix user community, but by following the reference,
things went pretty much without a hitch.
Unless you are a Postfix guru you should own this book if you administer servers
running Postfix. The explanations of how Postfix works and how to configure
it are very clear and easy to understand. Following the Postfix-users maillist
can sometimes be intimidating and confusing as experts are many times talking
to their peers with language that lower experienced users struggle to understand.
I found that this book did a great job of putting things in easy to understand
terms and the biggest message I have is that this book is practical, practical
and PRACTICAL. I very much appreciate having a copy.
Postfix Resources
About the Author: Peter O'Hara joined Guardian Digital in May
1999 with more than 20 years of diverse expertise in Unix/Linux systems in the
financial and telecommunications markets. O'Hara is responsible for managing the
Internet software development and Internet communications/messaging efforts at
Guardian Digital. O'Hara has held a wide range of roles as in both implementation
and development. His experience includes Naval Systems Engineering at AT&T, trading
support at Kidder Peabody and Merrill Lynch in New York and the worldwide data
center for UPS.
Powered by AkoComment! |
