[H-GEN] FreeBSD Sendmail Set-up

Greg Black gjb at gbch.net
Wed Jan 23 07:02:20 EST 2002


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John Duncan wrote:

| On Wed, Jan 23, 2002 at 11:40:07AM +1000, Greg Black wrote:
| > "john duncan" wrote:
| > 
| > | The way it is described on the website is what we have
| > | used but the queue won't run except by hand and it
| > | seems complicated to me when the README is the
| > | same as on OpenBSD.
| > 
| > How does his installation differ from the default?  When
| > installed, FreeBSD has sendmail setup to run (which I hate,
| > because I have to run around removing binaries and doing other
| > draconian things to stop it as I don't use sendmail).
| > 
| > This description doesn't really tell us enough to work from.
| > What has he changed from the default?  What were the goals from
| > those changes?  What (exactly) happens?  How does this differ
| > from his expectations?
|  
|  It is hard to find out over the miles exactly what he has done
| but as I helped him set up userppp and news he seems to be doing
| right.The idea of course is for him to masquerade as his ISP and
| relay all mail through his ISP.
|  This is not the worry my sendmail.mc works right and he is using
| the same form but when he makes a sendmail.cf it gives locked
| mailbox errors which should be fixed by modifying local mailer flags
| which we have tried as discussed on FreeBSD mailing lists.
|  It is alright as far as it goes but the local mailer will not
| run the queue without manual intervention,he can send and receive
| mail alright but it isn't put in his mutt mailbox automatically.
| Fetchmail delivers his mail to sendmail alright and he can send
| mail to me from mutt ok.

As a non-user of sendmail since v5, I can't guess what his
problem is from such a vague description, so there's not much
more I can suggest directly.

|  The how-to in the FreeBSD website don't use the explicit m4 build
| and I was wondering if I can get him to use this the same as I
| would on OpenBSD.
|  He has just told me however that as well as the default set-up he
| also added a sendmail package off the CD's, this could be the problem.
| Don't know what this would have done.

He should do /one/ of the following:

  1. Remove the sendmail package that he added and use the
     supplied sendmail and follow the FreeBSD instructions[1].

  2. Remove the sendmail package that he added and get the
     latest stable sendmail from sendmail.org and follow their
     instructions.

As a general rule, it's really unwise to install variant
versions of system utilities (such as sendmail) unless you
already know what you're doing.  Trying to resurrect a broken
system after such a step is frequently painful.

----------
[1] This might be tricky, as it could result in blowing away
    some of the FreeBSD installation as well; he would need to
    know how to restore it, or else re-install FreeBSD to get
    things back the way they should be.  That would also mean
    backing up his other customisations so he could restore
    them.

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