[BALUG-Talk] [BALUG-Admin] balug.org DNS review

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Todd Hawley (celticdm@gmail.com):

> Yep that rant pretty much sums it up doesn't it?

And in an _institutional_ setting, that syndrome is difficult to avoid
when it happens (except by seeking employment elsewhere).  In our own
computing lives, we can rather often reduce the madness by just saying
'no'.  I've been having an ongoing conversation with Michael Paoli 
(lately, on the balug-admin list) about places to reduce needless
complexity with BALUG's server setup, and also in my own server setup,
for example.  There's a lot that can be done, and most of it's
low-hanging fruit.

Way back around 1997, I'd been considering typical & recurring security
threats to the Red Hat Linux installation I was then running, and
decided one day that U. of Washington in.pop3d could no longer be
justified.  It exposed passwords in plaintext across the Internet, 
for starters.  I considered installing an IMAP daemon (Dovecot didn't
yet exist), but for various reasons I don't quite recall didn't, and
decided to make my life simpler by just running _no_ Mail Delivery Agent
daemons.  I got in contact with my users, and said, you can either use 
one of linuxmafia.com's console-mode local mail programs (mutt, pine,
elm, etc.) or, if you insist on fetching your mail to some desktop
machine, just use rsync over ssh to do so.

One of my users just could not abide that.  She loved her Eudora and
didn't want to change her way of fetching mail.  I said, sorry you're
unhappy, but my system, my rules.  She left, which is fine if she'd
rather deal with Yahoo Mail (which she does to this day).

To sum:  On your own system, you aren't obliged to make dumb software
choices (bad code, bad network protocols, etc.) just because they're
popular.  So, IMO, why not make the most of that freedom?