[ale] [Fwd: Linux Weaknesses, Comments]

[Chris Ricker]

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On Wed, 20 Nov 1996, Jon-Michael J. DeBona wrote:

> I'm not a member of ALE, but I subscribe to your mailing list.  I was
> just wondering if anyone had any comments on the following letter.
> Thanks.

I sure do ;-).

Here's the letter:

>We have had a number of requested from customers for things that require
>some special "setup" recently and that do not seem obvious with Linux.
>We are in a competitive market here in Atlanta and are looking at other
>OS's i.e. Sun Solarus.  Here are some of the request.  (We are running
>2.0.1 with Apache and Qpopper.)  People are asking for long mial names
>like firstname.lastname.company at theirdomain.com.  Our sendmail doesn't
>seem to handle this.  Also may need virtual mail servers and maybe
>virtual WEB servers.  Some of our subscribers are asking about secure
>servers, like Netscape, real audio and the list goes on.  I've been told
>to switch to the Debian version and we may; but I think the kernel is the
>same. Question is will Linux hold up for the more specialized tasks as
>well all expand on systems and grow up or will we all be switching to
>other OS's in the future? 

I don't know what sendmail they're running, but it should be the exact
same one that runs on Solaris, and it should support long user names.  If
you don't believe me, send mail to
chris.ricker.absurdly.long.address at ricker.gt.ed.net and it'll get to me
just fine.  It takes about a whole 10 seconds to set up, and yes,
ricker.gt.ed.net is a linux box. 

Apache supports virtual web servers.  Secure servers for linux are
available (stronghold, apache-ssl, etc.).  I suspect the problem is with
them not knowing how to do what they want done, not with linux itself.

later,
chris

p.s.  Note that this isn't to say that Linux is the do-all, be-all,
all-purpose solution to all computing problems.  I'm just saying that the
problems reported here with linux don't exist.

Also note that I'll delete that long email alias soon, so if you just
*have* to try it for yourself, you better hurry ;-)

--
Chris Ricker                                   gt1355b at prism.gatech.edu

"All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed."
              -- Sean O'Casey

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