sendmail / no longer primary

[Fred Martin_1]

We've been using sendmail as an smtp/pop3 mail server for all of our host's mail clients.

Today we are implementing MS Exchange, all clients will be going there now.

sendmail will still be used to send/receive certain system-and-application related email to a few users to and from on Exchange but otherwise the 'normal' user population will no longer need accounts on that HP-UX box.

Can anyone provide a punch list of this I need to do to get sendmail to not believe that it is the primary email server?

I had asked before here about how to make it a secondary server - not sure that's needed. Primarily, I just want it to be able to send email to folks on exchange that it used to have locally.

For example, if a root cron script used to send email to user 'fred@mydomain.com' who was a local user, now it needs to send the email to 'fred@mydomain.com' on the Exchange box.

I'll put the Exchange box as the smart host in sendmail and change my local DNS MX record to point to Exchange. Not sure of the other steps.

My sendmail.cw file contains a list like this one:

localhost
mydomain.com
hpux.mydomain.com
mail
mail.mydomain.com

Any comments on what to do with that?

Fred

[Steven Schweda]

> I'll put the Exchange box as the smart
> host in sendmail and change my local DNS MX
> record to point to Exchange. Not sure of
> the other steps.

I know nothing, but I'm not sure that there
are other steps (or need to be). You _can_
try to cripple the HP-UX system's ability to
handle e-mail, but if no one actually sends
it any, and if it sends all it has elsewhere,
then who cares if it's still willing to
handle it?

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

Shalom Fred,

Most shops just implement DS relay to the Exchange box from Unix.

Those relationships need to be set up explicitly by IP address on the Exchange server.


You may have to use HP's imitation of the sendmail m4 process to build a new sendmail.cf file.

http://hpux.ws/buildmail.hpux.text

Has the details.

SEP

[Fred Martin_1]

There was a pretty quick solution. I changed the DS smart host to be the Exchange box, and then removed everything from the sendmail.cw file except the unqualified hostname of the sendmail box.

Now, it no longer accepts mail for my domain but happily forwards it to Exchange.

The caveat, and I think I like it, is that unqualified email generated from the sendmail server itself stays there.

Email sent from unix to 'fred' is accepted by sendmail and delivered to the local user fred. Email sent to 'fred@mydomain.com' is no longer accepted and forwarded to the Exchange server.

I had a few watchdog scripts running that sent email to certain users but I just modified them with the FQDN in the email address.

Thanks,

Fred

[Jose Mosquera]

Hi Fred,

Please ensure that your /etc/resolv.conf file have the following entry:
domain mydomain.com

Also if you want force that sendmail cannot automatically determine your domain please set at /etc/mail/resolv.conf this entry:
Dj mydomain.com

Rgds.

[Fred Martin_1]

thanks

[Fred Martin_1]

FYI, email can still be sent to the sendmail server but only if the address is fully qualified with the server name, i.e.
account@server.mydomain.com

This turned out to be a good thing, I have a couple of sendmail accounts that receive automated EDI messages that are retrieved by a unix program on a schedule, for processing.

So, on the Exchange server that is now accepting email for mydomain.com, there is a mailbox set up with the same name as the old sendmail address, and that one just forwards the email to the sendmail server using the FQDN.

So, all good.