Regarding sendmail error

[Kavita Poonia]

Hello All,

Whenever I am trying to start sendmail by executing below command on my Client server (HP-UX11.31) then its giving following error. Please suggest

# /sbin/init.d/sendmail start
Sendmail server is disabled, You cannot start it manually using
sendmail script.

# more /etc/rc.config.d/mailservs
#########################################
# Mail configuration. See sendmail(1m) #
# @(#) mailservs version 8.11
#########################################
#
# BSD's popular message handling system
#
# SENDMAIL_SERVER: Set to 1 if this is a mail server and should
# run the sendmail deamon.
# SENDMAIL_SERVER_NAME: If this is not a mail server, but a client being
# served by another system, then set this variable
# to the name of the mail server system name so that
# site hiding can be performed.
# SENDMAIL_RECVONLY: If set to 1, then sendmail perform "receive only"
# function. In other words, users are not allowed
# to send mail from this domain or process the mail
# queue.
# SENDMAIL_SENDONLY: If set to 1, then sendmail perform "send only"
# function. In other words, users are not allowed
# to receive mails in this domain.
#
#
# The priority(from high to low) set for the above mentioned flags
# are in the order SENDMAIL_SERVER, SENDMAIL_SERVER_NAME,
# SENDMAIL_RECVONLY, SENDMAIL_SENDONLY.
#
SENDMAIL_SERVER=0
export SENDMAIL_SERVER_NAME=
export SENDMAIL_RECVONLY=0
export SENDMAIL_SENDONLY=0


Thanks & regards,
Kavita

[Patrick Wallek]

Well, the sendmail script is telling you exactly what is wrong.

In your /etc/rc.config.d file the "SENDMAIL_SERVER" is set to '0'. To start sendmail you need to set this to '1', just as it says in the file.

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Kavita:

You don't need 'sendmail' running as a daemon in order to send mail from your server.

Does that answer your question?

Regards!

...JRF...

[Kavita Poonia]

@Patrick: Do we really need to set SENDMAIL_SERVER=1 as its a Client and not source server ???

@James: Yes, I know sendmail is not necessary to run to send mails but why I have all the emails sent from this server are in deferred state.

Thanks & regards,
Kavita

[Patrick Wallek · Accepted solution]

>>Do we really need to set SENDMAIL_SERVER=1 as its a Client and not source server ???

No, but that's not what was asked. :)

>>"...but why I have all the emails sent from this server are in deferred state."

Have a look at /var/adm/syslog/mail.log and see what errors are being reported when trying to send mail.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom Kavita,

To get mail off the server try a cron job that does this:

sendmail -q

That runs the queue runner, which if all other things are correctly configured, such as DS (smart relay) will get mail off your server.

When a program tries to send an email, it will queue, but it should process out with your cron job.

As noted. No reason at all to run the sendmail deamon if mail is outgoing only.

export SENDMAIL_SENDONLY=0

That does however indicate that there is a send only mode to sendmail as reconfigured by HP. It might save you some hassle.

SEP

[Kavita Poonia]

Also we are not able to do telnet to source smtp server from this client server via port 25 which is registered on this client server for sendmail and client server is also registered on SMTP server. Can it be a network issue ?

#-> telnet 10.35.55.204 25
Trying...
Connected to 10.35.55.204.
Escape character is '^]'.
Connection closed by foreign host.
[root@prdbea01:

# more /var/adm/syslog/mail.log |grep -i error
Feb 14 06:32:56 prdbea01 sendmail[7766]: o1EBWa7f007766: to=ncsunixia@NCSUS.JNJ.com, delay=00:00:20, mailer=relay, pri=0, relay=smtp.na.jnj.com:nc...aexmea2.na.jnj.com, dsn=4.4.3, stat=Transient parse error -- message queued for future delivery

[Steven E. Protter]

Sorry, I missed a detail.

The server accepting the relay must be running some kind of daemon to accept mail.

Microsoft Exchange and sendmail both require explicit configuration, usually by IP address of the server being permitted to relay and a restart of the daemons that accept mail.

Also see that firewalls on HP-UX and the mail server permit the traffic on port 25.

SEP

[Horia Chirculescu]

Hello,

>The server accepting the relay must be running some kind of daemon to accept mail.

I believe I have found the same mistake on another post too.

It is not enough to run sendmail -q on regular bases, because there will be no queued messages to deal with.

Horia.