There is a single Postfix server sitting in a server room in Sunninghill, Johannesburg. It was first turned on in 2003. It has handled roughly 80 million inbound messages since. It runs on a Dell PowerEdge from that same year, with a disk that has never been swapped out. Until March, it had an uptime measured in years.
Themba (a pseudonym; we protect the people who keep critical things running) has been its sole admin for almost the entire time. He took over from the previous admin in 2006. He told me once, with no apparent irony: “It's a mail server. It receives mail, it sends mail. Why would I touch it.”
In 2019 an external consultant was hired to “modernise” Eskom's email infrastructure. The recommended migration was to Microsoft 365. The expected cost was roughly R9 million over three years, plus the cost of migrating 30,000 mailboxes and the user-training overhead that always comes with large exchange migrations. Themba was asked to sign off on the plan. He refused.
He did not refuse out of nostalgia. He refused because the existing system, on its 16-year-old hardware, was still meeting its SLA at 99.97% availability, with a per-user operating cost of less than R2/month, including Themba's salary. The migration would have introduced a recurring cost of roughly R25 per user per month, plus a multi-year window of disruption during cutover. The total cost of ownership over five years went up by an order of magnitude.
The consultant's report argued the new system would be more “modern” and more “feature-rich.” It would, on paper, integrate with the rest of the Office 365 environment Eskom was standardising on. It would, the report said, “future-proof” the email function. Themba marked this paragraph as the reason for his refusal.
When you reach for “future-proof,” you are telling me you do not understand the future. Themba, paraphrased from the meeting
The decision went up two levels before it was upheld. Themba was told, politely, that his refusal was appreciated. The request to migrate was quietly withdrawn. The Postfix server kept running.
In March 2026, during the load-shedding spike that took down several hyperscale email services in the region, Eskom's email kept delivering. Themba would later tell me this was coincidence, not preparation: his design did not anticipate load-shedding; his design was simply inexpensive enough that adding a small UPS and a cheap failover upstream was obvious and cheap. The same robustness fell out naturally of the “do less, spend less” posture.
Why this story is the Linux Institute story
We publish a free newsletter for the same reason Themba kept that server. Most Linux tutorials are pitched at people who want to do more. We are pitched at people who want to do less, better.
The right configuration for most people is the boring one. The right hardware is what you already have, with an SSD if you can afford it. The right answer is the one that does not need a migration in five years' time.
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