[BBLISA] REVIEW: Sendmail Cookbook

[Michael Steeves]

So there's this nifty offer from O'Reilly, where they'll let someone
have a copy of their books if you'll do a review, and make it public
(for details, get in touch with Adam Moskowitz, either at BBLISA or by
sending him an e-mail (adamm at menlo.com)).

You can also get to this review at
http://www.raingods.net/archives/2005/01/review_sendmail.html

Title: Sendmail Cookbook: Administering, Securing & Spam-Fighting
Author: Craig Hunt
Publisher: O'Reilly & Assoiciates, Inc.


Anyone that's had to administer sendmail for any length of time
probably has a copy of O'Reilly's Sendmail. While this book is
comprehensive, and provides you a comprehensive listing of every knob
to be turned and button to be pushed, the main thrust is in telling
you all the options for various features, and not in providing a basic
walkthrough on setting up and using some of the features.

Craig Hunt's Sendmail Cookbook provides a handful of "recipies" for
doing some useful stuff in sendmail, starting with runthroughs of the
build process, and covering topics like using external sources like
NIS and LDAP to pull aliases, SPAM, SMTPAUTH and TLS/SSL, and queue
management, to list some of the chapters. Each chapter starts with a
brief overview (a couple of pages) of the topic, and then a series of
sections that provide some task to be done (e.g. Configure
masquerading to hide only hosts that are specifically identified for
masquerading), a solution, and then a more in-depth discussion of what
was done, alternative ways to accomplish the task, and sometimes some
testing/debugging examples.

Unfortunately, while I had several sections (LDAP support, queue
groups) that I was going to make good use of, I ended up changing jobs
(to someplace that runs Postfix) before I had a chance to really work
on implementing most of them, but what I did use there (the TLS/SSL
setup and configuration sections) was clear and pretty easy to follow.
Some of the sections, also, seemed to be fairly basic stuff (a lot of
the sections on masquerading, for instance), though it may be that
those sections were ones I was already pretty familiar with, and so
didn't get much from them.

For admins that mostly just need the bat book to help them with any
sendmail issues/questions, this book may not be worthwhile, but for
people that are looking for walkthroughs of setting up and using
various features of sendmail, they should definitely check this out.

-- 
Michael Steeves (msteeves at panix.com)
"Well, that's an idea all right. Not a good one, but it's an idea."
	-- Tom Servo