Reviews
There is a more or less valuable documentation for every product, project or technology. Especially in the open source area various communities offer a helping hand in blogs, forums and mail lists. So the question is: "Why should I spend money on a particular book and invest time in reading it?" On this page I have published my opinion about books I have recently read. Hopefully someone'll find it useful. Comments are very welcome. Please use the contact form.
Postfix Einrichtung Betrieb und Wartung (My rating: 4 of 5)
Postfix is one of the most widely used Mail Transfer Agents (MTA). It is included as installable package with most Linux distributions. Being installed that way one easily gets a runing (and even mostly secure) instance of Postfix. But MTAs are targeted by spammers who firstly want to misuse them as spam relays and secondly want to address their spam to the mailboxes maintained by the MTA. To prevent this the administrator must take extreme care about the configuration. A deep understanding of Postfix is needed for that purpose. That's what the authors Ralf Hildebrandt and Patrick Ben Koetter are trying to provide with their book. This is a review about the German second edition which is based on the English first edition of "The Book of Postfix". Information might not be completely accurate for that edition.
Bibliographic Information
- Book Title:
- Postfix Einrichtung Betrieb und Wartung
- Author(s):
- Ralf Hildebrandt, Patrick Ben Koetter
- Publishing Info:
- dpunkt.verlag GmbH, Heidelberg, 2008
- ISBN:
- 978-3-89864-518-8
Summary
The book's four parts cover basic knowledge and secure configuration up to performance tuning and implementation of special requirements. The good structure allows to safely leave out chapters the reader might not be interested in (e.g. Postfix on a dialup connection). Understanding the rest will not be hindered.
The chapters about secure basic configuration, content filtering with so called restrictions, SMTP-Authentication and performance tuning deserve highest marks. On the other hand the description of encrypting the authentication process using digest mechanisms could have been more detailed. The authors focus more (if not too much) on encrypting the hole connection via TLS. A demerit in the chapter about restrictions is the fact that all configuration options are assigned to the section "smtpd_recipient_restrictions". Assigning configuration options in Postfix is far more flexible than that. That fact at least should have been mentioned.
Conclusion
The reader will have a deep understanding of Postfix after having read this book. Following the given instructions will lead to a considerably secure Postfix installation. For the very few parts, where this book is not detailed enough, the online documentation will help out [External: Postfix Online Documentation]. Thanks to the knowledge acquired from the book even this will be far more understandable. The book is 100% recommended for buying. The time and money are definitely well invested.
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