Along with this website, I also run my own SMTP/IMAP and name services on my own server and connection. (It’s not a very fast connection, but it generally does okay.) Every once in a while a security alert will come out that affects me: today it was on sendmail. Since I haven’t yet converted this box to Gentoo, I moseyed on over to the RedHat page on this, downloaded the source RPM and executed a rpm –rebuild on it. After a minute or two it had built the binary packages which I installed, first backing up my .mc file that would take some time to rebuild properly. Then a quick stop and start of the service and everything was good.
No reboot. No restart of the Cyrus IMAP daemon. No reconfiguration necessary. Everything just worked, and after dealing with one-size-fits-all monster mail servers that require operating system upgrades, that kicks ass.