Comment by traceroute66 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by traceroute66 | Hacker News Reader

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> How does it compare to postfix?

I haven't done a detailed comparison, but going how the OpenBSD guys go with other re-implementations (e.g. LibreSSL vs OpenSSL), I'm going to guess that it will have a reduced feature-set and capabilities.

I've nothing against the OpenBSD guys, but sometimes its a case of "right tool for the job". OpenBSD is great for firewalls and routers. Of course OpenSSH is without competitor, its just awesome.

But (some of) the rest of the OpenBSD toolset I'm not too sure ... for example Chrony is lightyears ahead of OpenNTPD etc.

Postfix is an excellent MTA. Written from a security-first mentality. Its widely deployed, and hence battle tested. As a result of its wide deployment its pretty much a case of "everyone knows how it works", the Postfix mailing list is excellent in terms of getting support.

TL;DR personally I see no reason to replace Postfix with anything, be it OpenSMTPD or anything else.

OpenSMTPD is the right answer if you want a general purpose mail server [1] that is secure by default. [2]

[1]: https://poolp.org/posts/2021-01-31/january-2021-opensmtpd-li...

[2]: https://www.openbsd.org/security.html

I use OpenNTPD on my router. Apparently time on local network is "exact" (off by some 50 ms) which is good enough for me. I don't need my clocks to be light years ahead indeed.

I would guess that the IBM/Eclipse license was a major problem from a BSD perspective.

"OpenSMTPD is a fairly complete SMTP implementation."

Some might say "fairly complete" is in the eye of the beholder. ;-)

Technically OpenNTPD is a "fairly complete implementation" too, but its a waste of time compared to Chrony.

It's simple, works, synchronizes my clock, and doesn't have a manpage thousands of lines long.

It's also explicitly intended not to solve every NTP use case but rather just the common "I want my laptop's clock to be roughly accurate" use case.

It refuses to deal with a clock running fast, resulting in my laptop not being accurate. (It usually hovers around 10 minutes in the future)

Oh okay, I never had any problems with it, and I've been using it for many years.

That's fair; it might be that my hardware clock runs fast and if you don't have that problem it's not a problem.

Not sure why you need a separate NTP client running when systemd has systemd-timesyncd.

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