Quote:
I would be willing to bet that well over 90% of the installations of Apache, Sendmail and BIND were not due to someone deciding on the particular server in question. They are in use because someone installed a Linux distibution or Unix/BSD product that used the server in question by default. These people no more chose to use Apache than 99% of Windows administrators chose to use IIS.


Well, I'm sure those servers had a large factor in what OS was chosen for a Web/mail/DNS server. People know Apache runs well, Bind runs well, and well, something here about sendmail. For example, I initially had an NT server at home ages ago doing file sharing to my network. I wanted to start tinkering with web development, and looked into replacing the server as IIS and ASP wern't my first choice. So, I looked at Apache for Windows, and found it ran decently. Next, I wanted to do internet sharing from the server, and I began looking into Linux a bit. Over time, that look turned into deciding a mail server would be nice too.

Now I have a Linux box in the basement running Samba and ATalkd for file sharing, Apache 2 for web with PHP, Postfix for mail, Courier for tossing it to clients, and Bind for local DNS caching and resolution of DHCP clients. I hold no true attachment to Linux specificially, it just happens to be the one that comes with the most products I want to use. I could install Windows variants, and as long as Microsoft makes them do so at no cost currently. But I still choose to keep that server box Linux. Not because it is Linux, but because it is a good platform for Apache, Postfix and so on.

Any more, distributions are either moving to Postfix as a default, or asking what should be installed (Sendmail/postfix/qmail). Sendmail will probably hold the majority for a while longer until more servers out there are upgraded and migrations done away from it, like what I did in 2001.