Ubuntu is under attack

[Mike Bird]

On Sun, 2005-12-18 at 04:12, Vincent Trouilliez wrote:
> I can only speak for myself, but as a "normal" Desktop user, I have used
> Ubuntu very happily for 14 months 24/7 without even knowing that "mailx"
> and "postfix" existed. As for "MTA", I don't even know what it stands
> for !
> So I would say, whatever these things are, they are definitely not
> essential to a successful Linux experience for "human beings", which I
> thought was the target audience of Ubuntu ! ;-)

This is frightening.  Do you have any idea what you're missing?

Mail provides your daily report of the anti-virus scan of your
hard drive.  You do scan your hard drive regularly don't you?
You do want to have some kind of heads up if viruses are getting
in to your system?  You don't want to be sharing viruses via
Samba or FTP or email do you?  You do want to know if clamscan
accidently deleted something important?

Mail provides your daily report that you forgot to configure
tmpreaper.  You did install tmpreaper didn't you?  What, you
reboot when your /tmp is full?

Mail provides your daily report of your backup to tape, to DVD,
or via rsync.  You do backup your system don't you?  You want
to know if the backup is too big for the DVD, or if a tape
write failed?

Mail provides your hourly report of your anti-virus definition
updates.  You want to know when you're protected against that
new worm that you just read about.  More importantly, you want
to know if a firewall or proxy server somewhere is borked and
preventing your regular anti-virus definition updates.

When one of your hard drive mirrors breaks, mail tells you.  You
do mirror all your hard drives don't you?  We do, except laptops.
It's a heck of a lot cheaper to install a second drive than to
recover from a drive crash.  All drives crash.

I understand that mail can also tell you when a hard drive is
close to failure, using SMART monitoring.  I confess I haven't
seen this happen yet.

All those are standard reports from Linux desktops.  Most
servers generate more.  Some desktops generate more if you
have particularly applications installed.  If you're not
setting up mail properly on your Ubuntu installations
then you're doing a disservice to your clients, family,
and friends.

Now some people will want those emails delivered to their guru -
- the guy or gal who installed Ubuntu for them and answers the
difficult questions for them.  In poorer countries without
Internet access, people will probably want those emails
delivered locally.  Most newbies trying Ubuntu on their own
will probably want their emails sent to "me at myisp.com" so
that they arrive in their regular message stream without having
to check a second mail account.  Postfix can do all that very
easily.

By default, postfix need only listen on 127.0.0.1.  There's no
security downside to running postfix.  Nor is postfix difficult
to install - it's pretty much point and click in debconf.  Nor
is postfix difficult to maintain - it just does its job quietly.

Why was Ubuntu broken?  All we've had thus far on this list
are a lot of complaints about postfix being removed and a few
people saying that they didn't know that mail is important.

Now I'm not particularly interested in lynching the culprit.
What should happen is that one of the Ubuntu leaders should
get on this list right away and assure us that this will be
fixed for Dapper and that measures will be put in place so
that know-nothings cannot again throw out critical functions
on religious grounds without warning or reasoned discussion.

--Mike Bird