'Local' MailScanner config file?

[David Lee]

On Mon, 27 Apr 2009, Nigel Kendrick wrote:

> I look after 6 servers running MailScanner and the config for all of 
> them is pretty much the same except for a few site-specific specific 
> parameters. It would make admin a tad easier if I could keep 
> MailScanner.conf generic, but have site-specific elements to override 
> the generic settings in, say, MailScanner-local.conf. For example, one 
> thing I do occasionally is re-enable the forwarding of spam to a mailbox 
> for checking and it would be handy to upload a revised MailScanner.conf 
> to all servers rather than have to go edit the files every time.   As 
> far as I can tell, local configs are not supported - yet!? Julian - nice 
> weekend project if this wet weather keeps up!?

Just to put a slightly different consideration on this, to look wider than 
MS.  You may well other cluster-like services at your site where you wish 
similar "mostly common but with individual minor variant" configuration. 
If so, then you might wish to investigate things such as "cfengine" which 
allow you both to hold configurations together across machines, but also 
to do some controlled variant-tailoring.

So the MS bit of our cfengine config has some clauses that apply to all 
hosts, and some that apply to particular sub-classes of our MS machines. 
Those sub-classes might be conceptual (inbound MX gateway; outbound 
smarthost; internal SMTP submission) or particular tweaks (on our random 
variety of hardware different "Max Children" settings).

Obviously that is a bigger and wider and longer-term thing than a quick 
fix to just MS, but it might be a service-wide question worth asking (even 
if the eventual outcome ends up "not applicable".)

-- 

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