[Techtalk] Sendmail to Postfix

[Dominik Schramm]

Hi,

On 12/13/2003 08:20 AM, Raquel Rice wrote:

 > I've had Debian/Woody installed on my new server for about 3 weeks
 > and I'm really happy with it. I installed Sendmail as my MTA,
 > because that's what I've been used to. I've been looking at Postfix
 > and am beginning to think that it would be a good alternative to
 > Sendmail.
 >
 > Anyone have any advice for making the switchover "painless"?

That all depends on where you got sendmail from and which postfix
version you want.

Note: I haven't done this with sendmail --> postfix, but with
sendmail --> exim. The procedure should be the same however.
Btw. if the MTA is one your major concerns, wouldn't you like
to give exim a shot. It's different from both sendmail and postfix
but you can do very advanced stuff a lot easier than with sendmail
(things that might not even be possible in Postfix).

End of advertisement here, here's what I would do if I were you:

1. If you're using the sendmail and postfix packages of Debian/Woody
and you don't care about having no working MTA for a few minutes,
then just do
# apt-get install postfix

(This will automatically remove sendmail and install postfix, since
these two packages conflict because they both provide the
pseudo-package "mail-transport-agent".)

Then configure postfix to your liking and you're done.

2. If you're using the sendmail and postfix packages of Debian/Woody*
*and you do care about a one-second downtime...*
*Install the* *postfix version that comes with Debian/Woody from
source, configure and test-run it on a different machine or on the
sendmail machine but on a different port. If you have a working
configuration, just put the configuration files where dpkg would
put them and run "apt-get install postfix" then. When asked if
you want the package-maintainer's version of the configuration
files, just say no.

3. If you plan to build everything from source, the procedure is
about the same as in 2.
Just install postfix along with sendmail, when you're done configuring,
stop sendmail and start postfix with one command
# /etc/init.d/sendmail stop && /etc/init.d/postfix start

hope this helps; something important missing?

regards,
dominik