Vincent, Fair enough points. In my case, I control every server, as well as the firewall and the rest of the network, so it's not apples-to-apples. Your point about all layers of security handy is a very good one, though. I was looking at it from the standpoint that if I have a hacked server, I have serious trouble anyhow, which was probably not the right way to look at it. Cheers Ross -----Original Message----- From: Vincent Fox [mailto:vbfox@ucdavis.edu] Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2007 1:51 PM To: Ross Becker Cc: perdition-users(a)vergenet.net Subject: Re: [PERDITION-USERS] Perdition config question I work in the UC Davis Data Center we have about 70K users plus or minus a few hundred. When more than a couple of systems end up getting attached to your "private" network, at some point you will have to do a LENGTHY investigation when some system you didn't even know about, gets hacked and then the security folks wonder whether 70K users could have had their passwords sniffed. Let's not get into proper security practice discussion, if you work in a Data Center you know you have enough systems something will go wrong or maybe you'll just get hit with a 0-day sploit. Things do go wrong and I prefer to not trust anything will take advantage of any layers of security handy. IMO plaintext is not worth the trouble. I like the added security of being able to say "I didn't trust the network" because sometimes you really can't unless it's a one-man show with a handful of systems. If you are not using this in a big shop and do not have these problems then by all means. I can tell you from running Perdition in this mode, the CPU on our 4 Perdition frontends are barely ticking over at load peak of MAYBE 0.2 during the Fall quarter rush. Our frontends are nothing exciting really just some COTS 1U Opterons. We use internally generated certs for Perdition to backend mail-store and that is no big deal to set up. It is very nice having Perdition in the front, we can migrate users around in the backend to all kinds of mail-stores Exchange or Cyrus or whatever, it's transparent. We just update the record in LDAP as to what backend they are stored on. I just wish Perdition had GSSAPI support.