On Thu, 8 Jun 2023, Antonio Leding wrote:
Just curious - the first thing the hit me was “27 or so year-old…”
Fedora was released 19 years ago and Dovecot 20 — what am I missing? And are you saying this box has been unchanged since ’03?
Hi Antonio,
I had a lot of that in the eamil and the on a proof-read realized it was FAR too long, so I cut out what you're asking about! -ugh- But since you seem to be a historian, I'll indulge a little:
...We really started with a couple of old Sun SPARC "pizza boxes", a DEC Alpha, and a few also-rans of the early '90s. ... I could get "into the weeds" about the OS choices of the day, but as soon as it was available we installed the very first version of Red Hat - paid for the disk! ... It was 10-BaseT, DSL / T1 networking - And getting a domain name? PAIN IN THE ASS! ...
We transitioned from Red Hat to Fedora as just "inertia." I barely noticed the difference - marketing / packaging in my view.
The site has undergone continuous maintenance, of course. Hardware ages out, software too, sometimes, etc. (and even people) Today we're mostly on Fedora Server with a mix of SuperMicro and oth.... but I digress...
As for pre-Dovecot? I seem to recall that from mid '99 or so we were on Courier, but most of us didn't use it because we had accounts on the "local" boxes and could just login and who needs IMAP? But, we had some need for it, mostly due to people who were less sophisticated - at least that's my view. I suppose there were other motivations.
I honestly don't recall exactly why we switched to Dovecot, but I suspect it was due to an early adopter who was helping with our systems at the time. I've got some leftover config files dating from '04 so it goes back at least that far. We traded off hosting hardware with the guy I'm talking about - he had hardware at our site and we had one or more boxes at his site, which helps reliability, etc...
Anyway, thanks for the trip down Memory Lane. But can you lend ANY advice here?
Thanks, Richard