On Sun, May 31, 2020 at 10:07:41AM -0600, Keith Medcalf wrote:
On Saturday, 30 May, 2020 13:18, Joe Greco <jgreco@ns.sol.net> wrote:
The Internet didn't evolve in the way its designers expected. Early mistakes and errors required terrible remediation. As an example, look at the difficulty involved in running a service like e-mail or DNS. E-mail requires all sorts of things to interoperate well, including SPF, DKIM, SSL, DNSBL's, etc., etc., and it is a complicated service to run self-hosted. DNS is only somewhat better, with the complexity of DNSSEC and other recent developments making for more difficulties in maintaining self-hosted services.
I've been running my own DNS and e-mail for more than a quarter century. Contrary to your proposition it hasn't gotten much more complicated over than time.
Really? Because nowadays, there's all this extra crap that didn't used to exist.
From my perspective, it's gone from "configure Sendmail on your Sun workstation and compile Elm (back in the '80's)" to something a lot more complicated.
Now you need to sign your mail with DKIM, have SPF records, and even if you cross all the T's and dot all the I's, you can expect your mail to be rejected at some major mail sites because the LACK of a consistent high volume of mail being sent by your site is actually scored against you. On the inbound side, you now need to be filtering your mail with Spamassassin and DNSBL's, and also virus scanners because it's likely some of your users won't be. You need to support both IMAP _and_ webmail if you want to be able to support users, because we are now in that "post-PC" era where people expect to be able to sit down at an arbitrary PC and have an experience on par with that of any of the mail service providers. I've watched in dismay as many technically competent sysadmins, and even whole service providers, have given up and outsourced e-mail, because it is so difficult to do well. Even Apple finally ditched their OSX Server product's email services, which had for years been one of my best examples of "it's still possible to run this yourself." If this is your idea of "hasn't gotten much more complicated", I salute your technical prowess. It's not that I want this to be the status quo, but I'm also not so blind as to deny what is going on. :-( ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"-Asimov