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More on: Installing a POP Daemon on Red Hat Linux

From Tim Moss on Sun, 20 Feb 2000

Tim Moss commented on one reader's apparently unresolved problem:

Have him uncomment pop-3 in his /etc/inetd.conf. I believe it is commented out by default in current Red Hat distros.

Jim Dennis wrote:

>Hi Jim,
>Thank you very much! I did the following as you advised, but still failed:
>Installing a POP Daemon on Red Hat Linux

Of course I should have added a "check your inetd.conf" check to my instructions.

I have mixed feelings about this change to Red Hat's default /etc/inetd.conf.

On the one hand I applaud the advance towards better security. It's long been a problem in the UNIX world that companies leave services enabled and insecurely configured in their call avoidance efforts. Doing the "right thing" can often result in getting a very large number of technical support calls, which translates to EXPENSE for the commercial software vendor.

So it's nice that Red Hat is in a business where they can fix problems like this and not worry about the consequences.

On the other hand I think that it is absurd that they haven't enhanced their RPM's and package management to resolve the issue of configuring (and re-configuring) packages as they are installed and/or after the fact.

This is one of those respects in which I prefer Debian. If I install a Debian POP server it makes sure that the inetd.conf is configured to use it. It might ask me if I want to add an entry to limit the hosts.allow that are allowed to access this service.

Of course Red Hat couldn't simply adopt the Debian strategy. The Red Hat distributions are geared for an "install everything" approach. When I try to make an initial "minimal" installation in Red Hat I find that later efforts to add packages "as needed" are frought with trips into "dependency hell."

By contrast Debian excels at the minimal installation. Later addition (and removal) of packages is more robust than I've seen under any other OS. Dependencies and conflicts are handled (mostly automatically).

(At the same time Debian has room for improvement as well. I'll save my choice comments for a review of their next major release).

(Incidentally, any reader that writes to suggest using Linuxconf will get an e-rasberry! I won't even comment on my experiences with Linuxconf. Ugh!).

Copyright © 2000, James T. Dennis
Published in The Linux Gazette Issue 51 March 2000

HTML transformation by Heather Stern of Tuxtops, Inc., http://www.tuxtops.com/

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