Date: 2025-03-04 Updated: 2025-05-26

HTTP and SMTP server complexity

Two pieces at my server, which still annoy me are HTTP and SMTPD
daemons. Although mail is sometimes useful, when I want to contact
some hero online. For whatever reason not everyone is running own NPS
server yet.

Both things are too complex to do anything with them. Not really human
friendly. While technically it's not much a problem to run them, as
everything is setup and all works without any issue. The ability to
control them is minimal on my end. I don't mean just client or
frontend side, but the server, background machinery, all those moving
things behind the scene.

I have to admit, that my website is nice and easy to navigate and get
content. Also mail server is setup the simplest possible way without
any encryption and I am able to deliver messages into inbox of any
email provider.

They often say, email is not secure, not fully private. On the other
hand it's still pretty complex full of nonsense. If something is
accepted as not very secure and as easy subject to surveillance, then
at least it should be sipmle with just elementary moving parts.
HTTP and SMTP server functions are definitely not straightforward.

From regular view, those tools are not that complicated and complex.
One can setup them easily and within few minutes without much effort.
However if you dig a bit deeper, you found monsters there. I doubt
that a human can understand specifications of those huge protocols and
all of its parts. I can imagine to use NEX and NPS instead of both
those archaic tools.

Edit: Good news is, I already replaced HTTP web server with simple
Perl program web.pl which is called from inetd. This way I am able to
understand and control it.

Edit 2: Another good news is, I already replaced OpenSMTPD with simple
Perl script run from inetd. For now it's very bare bones, handling
just critical functions ;/

Edit 3: Mail off. All scripts replaced with simple pure POSIX shell.

There is always a simplicity about the present moment.