Sendmail

[Ron Irving]

Hi guys!!

We have a small network here, (kind of a staging area.) We have a couple of servers in the network, (1 X rx7640 & 1 X bladeserver.) Both are running 11.31. We'd like to get sendmail relaying to us, but DNS is not setup on the servers. We have a workstation setup as a mailserver. Is there a way to 'fool' sendmail in this case?

Curiously yours,

Ron

[Patrick Wallek]

You should be able to set up the smart relay in /etc/mail/sendmail.cf so that mail goes to the workstation that is the mail server.

You don't necessarily need DNS. Set up the hostnames in /etc/hosts so that they can get resolved locally.

Your /etc/nsswitch.conf may need:

hosts: files

[Michael Steele_2]

What is reported from:

grep DS /etc/mail/sendmail.cf?

This is your mail server.

[Ron Irving]

DSmailserver.usfi.com

syntax correct?

[Patrick Wallek]

That looks good.

Is mailserver.usfi.com defined in your /etc/hosts file?

[Ron Irving]

yup!

I just tried, # date | mailx -s "test mail" xxx@yyy.com

nothing yet. ran mailq -v, and it's in the queue. Is there something else I'm (likely) missing?

Regards!

[Patrick Wallek]

Anything useful in /var/adm/syslog/mail.log?

What does the mailq output show?

What happens if you do a 'sendmail -q' to try to clear out the queue.

[Michael Steele_2]

Is sendmail running?

ps -ef | grep -i sendmail

If it is then restart it.

If still problems then debug:

sendmail -bv alias@domain.com < /dev/null

Post messages

[Ron Irving]

root@fobdb / =#ps -ef | grep sendmail
root 14873 1257 0 18:47:20 pts/1 0:00 grep sendmail
root@fobdb / =#/sbin/init.d/sendmail start
mailserver.usfi.com
root@fobdb / =#ps -ef | grep sendmail
root 14925 1257 1 18:47:46 pts/1 0:00 grep sendmail
root@fobdb / =#sendmail -bv dmmcnish@yahoo.com < /dev/null
dmmcnish@yahoo.com... deliverable: mailer esmtp, host yahoo.com, user dmmcnish@yahoo.com


It looks like sendmail doesn't even start. Perplexing.

[Patrick Wallek]

The sendmail daemon does not have to run in order to send mail. When sending, sendmail is run just long enough to send the message and then it terminates.

Are there any messages in /var/adm/syslog/mail.log indicating any failures?