| Wietse Venema QUOTES / QUOTATIONS |
Adding functionality is not just a matter of adding code.
Quotation of Wietse Venema
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As of today, the Postfix mail transport agent has almost 50,000 lines of code, comments not included.
Quotation of Wietse Venema
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At the time the Sendmail program had a very poor reputation with respect to security, with four root vulnerabilities per year for two successive years.
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Coming back to the topic of computer security, the TCP Wrapper is an example of such a safety net. I wrote it when my systems were under attack by someone who appeared to walk through walls.
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Defect-free software does not exist.
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For many people my software is something that you install and forget. I like to keep it that way.
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However, writing software without defects is not sufficient. In my experience, it is at least as difficult to write software that is safe - that is, software that behaves reasonably under adverse conditions.
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I don't expect an overnight change of all desktops to what the US Military used to call B3 level security. And even that would not stop users from shooting themselves into the foot.
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I have no doubts that electronic mail will remain a powerful vector for propagation of viruses and other malware.
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I want to avoid locking people into solutions that work only with Postfix. People should have a choice in what software they want to use with Postfix, be it anti-virus or otherwise.
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I was going to visit IBM for six months as a visiting scientist. Now, six months is a lot of time, so I came with a whole list of projects that I might want to work on.
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In a previous life I wrote the software that controlled my physics experiments. That software had to deal with all kinds of possible failures in equipment. That is probably where I learned to rely on multiple safety nets inside and around my systems.
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Internally, Postfix does use multi-threading, for example, for its scheduler program that hands the mail queue requests to the mail delivery agents.
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Lack of documentation is becoming a problem for acceptance.
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Like all software, Qmail can survive only when it keeps up with changing requirements.
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Like most people, I am not smart enough that I can design software without having to restructure the software every now and then.
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Most of the effort in the software business goes into the maintenance of code that already exists.
Quotation of Wietse Venema
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My reply is: the software has no known bugs, therefore it has not been updated.
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One bug in an SMTP server can open up the whole machine for intrusion.
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Postfix keeps running even if one Postfix process dies; Windows requires that someone restarts the service.
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Postfix relies on multi-processing to increase separation between activities, and to increase resistance to failure.
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Qmail out of the box works fine, so people will want to use it regardless of licensing restrictions, even when the software does not ship with their system software.
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Sure, but competition is good for the user.
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The challenge with Postfix, or with any piece of software, is to update software without introducing problems.
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The Postfix security model is based on keeping software simple and stupid.
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This will surprise some of your readers, but my primary interest is not with computer security. I am primarily interested in writing software that works as intended.
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When I write software, I know that it will fail, either due to my own mistake, or due to some other cause.
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Windows favors multi-threading, which means that a service is implemented by one single process.
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With great effort I can reduce my own error rate to one bug in 1000 lines of code.
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Writing software that's safe even in the presence of bugs makes the challenge even more interesting.
Quotation of Wietse Venema
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