[TUHS] off-topic list

[Clem Cole]

Below...

On Mon, Jun 25, 2018 at 3:35 PM, Grant Taylor via TUHS <tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org
> wrote:

> On 06/25/2018 11:37 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
>
>> Ah ... Makes sense.  MMDF was possibly my favorite Unix MTA.
>>
>
> Hum.  I have no experience with MMDF.  Perhaps I should play.

​Warning.... there a lot of stuff that is pre-internet in the guts (i.e.
was designed during the Arpanet) so IP support got added to it.   And even
with the last versions, its missing a lot (i.e. I'm the person that
hacked^h^h^h^h^h^hadded the original BSD resolv client code to it one
weekend, lord knows how many years ago).   Again this is why QMAIL became
the replacement.  Borstien is an amazing coder and I respect him immensely,
although his personality leaves a little to be desired...​




>
>
> We shipped it as Masscomp's default Mail System for a longtime.
>>
>
> I never knew that MMDF was used anywhere other than SCO Unix.  (I don't
> know which SCO product.)
>
​Ahem ...   We did it before they did (by a number of year actually).   It
was also the mail for CS-NET/PhoneNET, when BBN picked it up.​



> According to Wikipedia PMDF was used on VMS.  Now I wonder if there's any
> relation to PMDF and what I've frequently heard referred to a Mail-11.

​Mail-11 is DEC's mail standard. And is mostly a protocol spec.

PMDF was a pseudo open source rewrite of MMDF (from on the mid western
universities I believe), that got taken closed and I never knew all of the
politics.  Larry M correct me here, he might know some of it, as I'm
thinking PMDF came out of Wisconsin originally.  Whoever wrote it, took the
CS-Net C MMDF implementation and rewrote it into Pascal for VMS - this was
during the height the C vs Pascal war in CS Depts and also the time of the
UNIX vs VMS wars.​     The DEC Pascal Compiler was very good and was an
excellent teaching compiler.   Paul W might remember the ordering of the
releases from the compiler group, but I think VMS Pascal was released
before VAX-11C -- which I think played into the MMDF/PMDF thing.   As I
recall, VMS Pascal definitely was bundled in the University package and was
'cheaper' if you were willing to run VMS instead of Unix at your
University.       Anyway, the folks that did PMDF formed a small firm and
sold it for a while.   There was a commercial IP implementation from France
call TUV for VMS and IIRC, the TUV folks bought PMDF and whole thing got
sold to a lot people and had quite a ride .





>
>
> It was only after I left that they broken down and switched to sendmail to
>> be like Sun and much of the rest of the internet.
>>
>
> The Wikipedia article also indicates that PMDF became Sun Java System
> Messaging Server.  Which seems to counter Clem's comment.
>
​I know nothing about that.   I wonder of the Pascal version got
reimplemented in Java at some point.  I do not know.  That would not
surprise me.​



>
> Or, perhaps as typical for Sun, there are multiple solutions to the same
> ""problem.  Ship Sendmail with the base OS but sell a larger product that
> (hypothetically) does a super set of functions.

​That would sound more like it.   Also left and right hands not talking to
each other.   Sun had become a large place by that point.​



>
>
> any MTA on the internet had to be hardenned.  I'm sure MMDF could be
>> attacked with stack overwrites and strcpy(3) style attacks because when
>> Crocker wrote it, that was not what was being considered.
>>
>
> Thankfully you don't have to put an MTA directly on the internet to be
> able to play with it.  It's trivial to put an MTA behind a smart host that
> that shields the (potentially) vulnerable MTA from the brunt of the
> Internet.

​Sure, but its more work than I want to mess with these days.   Best wishes
and have at it 😘​


ᐧ
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