Sneakers on a Dead Pig

With enough patience and perhaps some duct tape, you can get a pair of Air Jordan's onto a dead pig. You could strap two pair on if you like and even add a nice Celtics jersey, but there's still no way that pig is going to shoot any hoops. First of all, it's a pig. Second, did you notice that it's dead?

That's how I felt about a customer's question concerning strapping a modern Sendmail onto his legacy SCO 5.0.7 system. First, I'm not sure there is enough duct tape available anywhere to get these sneakers held in place. In the case of SCO, the pig may not be completely dead yet, but that sure is an awful wheezing noise it's making, isn't it it? Even when this particular pig might have been able to bounce around the court a little, I never liked running it as a mailserver. At the best of times SCO was several versions behind on Sendmail but my main reasoning was (and is) that you don't mix application servers with mail/web servers. That sort of blending makes it harder to test performance and security - I just don't like it.

And it's so unnecessary! Throw up a little Linux box and you have a modern, maintainable Sendmail almost instantly! I happen to sell Kerio if you don't want to mess with Sendmail and there are certainly plenty of other feature packed, secure choices available once you leave the wheezing pig. Tell the ancient SCO Sendmail that the Linux box is its Smart Server and be done with at least that part of SCO nonsense forever!

By the way, I detest professional team sports of all kinds. I really hesitated about using a basketball analogy here, but the image of a dead pig in basketball sneakers just seemed so right I had to use it. My apologies to pigdom.