Skip to Content
Building Secure Servers with Linux
book

Building Secure Servers with Linux

by Michael D. Bauer
October 2002
Intermediate to advanced
448 pages
14h 54m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Building Secure Servers with Linux

Postfix

Wietse Venema’s program, Postfix, provides an alternative to Sendmail that is simpler in design, more modular, and easier to configure and administer. Equally important, it’s designed with scalability, reliability, and security as fundamental requirements.

The remainder of this chapter brings you up to speed quickly on how to use Postfix as a secure means of exchanging your network’s email with Internet hosts. In particular, I’ll focus on deploying Postfix on firewalls, in DMZs, and in other settings in which your SMTP server will have contact with untrusted systems.

I won’t go into nearly as much depth with Postfix as I just did with Sendmail. The whole point of Postfix is ease of use: you’ll have no problem figuring out how to use Postfix given little more than the documentation and example configurations included with Postfix itself.

Postfix Architecture

On the one hand, since Postfix can do most of what Sendmail can, its architecture is arguably as complex or even a little more so than Sendmail’s. Postfix consists of a suite of daemons and helper applications, whereas Sendmail is essentially monolithic.

On the other hand, Postfix’s modularity actually makes it much simpler in practice. For Mr. Venema and the others who maintain Postfix’s code, it’s easier to fix a bug in the SMTP daemon if that daemon’s code is self-contained and not part of a much larger whole. As for end users, Postfix is administered mainly with the postfix command and a few others (most users only need ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Learning Linux Security

Learning Linux Security

Ric Messier
Linux: Powerful Server Administration

Linux: Powerful Server Administration

Uday Sawant, Oliver Pelz, Jonathan Hobson, William Leemans
Linux Security Cookbook

Linux Security Cookbook

Daniel J. Barrett, Richard E. Silverman, Robert G. Byrnes

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596002173Catalog PageErrata