[CentOS] OT: question on setting up an email server

[alex at milivojevic.org]

Quoting Feizhou <feizhou at graffiti.net>:

> When does a newbie gets a monster box to play with?

4 gigs of memory isn't as expensive as it used to be.  Not that cheap that I
would put 4 gigs into any of the computers in my basement.  But not that
expensive either.  Complete AMD64 system is not that much more expensive then
P4 system (other then processor and motherboard, all other components are
exactly the same).  So I'd say wast majority of newbies from rotten rich west
can financialy afford a "monster box to play with".

> DJB has already stated a long time ago that this should be done by 
> the OS or available tools.

Whatever way you put it, the following is buggy code:

   int foo;
   int *bar;
   foo = bar;

Yelling that limits were supposed to be setup on the system for your 
particular
program so that bar always fits into foo is not going to save you from 
the fact
that your programming practices were flawed!  The above code fragment is
probably the biggest single problem with many programs when Alpha processors
were introduced.  And now we see it again.

Now I don't know if that "bug" in qmail fits the above description 
exactly, but
I'm preaty darn sure it is something equivalent.

If you have such assumptions in the program, you either make checks at compile
time to automatically configure your program to use properly sized 
types ("long
foo; int *bar;" would work on AMD64, both are 64bit if program is compiled for
64bit environment), or you make checks during runtime.

>> After all, there's that famous quote from Bill Gates: "640K ought to be
>> enough for anybody".  Who knows, maybe one day we'll be quoting 
>> qmail author instead: "32 bits ought to be enough for anybody".
>
> I highly doubt it since he said nothing of the sort.

I haven't said he did.  It was a joke ;-)

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