sendmail - service.switch

[Fred Martin_1]

Some time ago I had patched sendmail and there was a note added to the top of the file service.switch that it was now obsolete, replaced by nsswitch.conf.

The other day I cold-installed an OS and downloaded Sendmail 8.11 special release.

When that was complete, there was the service.switch file, without the 'obsolete' comment.

So - is it obsolete, or not?

[Chris Wilshaw]

I don't believe it is obsolete.

We use it on installations on HP-UX 10.20, 11.00 and 11i

It works on all of them, so we continue to use it.

[Fred Martin_1]

But there is an nsswitch.conf ... does anyone know if it's not used by sendmail, but the OS instead?

If true then it would seem you could have OS name resolution and sendmail name resolution performed under different rules on the same machine.

[Bruno Ganino · Accepted solution]

Fred, read here
http://devrsrc1.external.hp.com/STK/impacts/i216.html
Bruno

[Fred Ruffet]

service.switch file is used by sendmail instead of the standard /etc/nsswitch.conf.

If you delete service.switch, it will fallback to nsswitch.conf usage. As long as it's better to have only one conf file, it's considered as obsolete. But "obsolete" doesn't mean it will be ignored. You could continue to use it if you have multiple OSes using sendmail and want the same config everywhere...