problem sending email ....

[K.C. Chan]

I have a host which has redhat8.0 installed. I've noticed from 8.0 to 9, there is a slight change on how sendmail is configured. I have a mail server which runs on rh7.3; for some reason I need to start up sendmail service to be able to send email out from redhat8, because by defualt it puts the email in /var/spool/sm-client dir. This doesn't get pick up unless you start up sendmail services. I know you don't need to do a thing with rh7.x, just send the email and it will get routed to your mail server.

What is the proper way of sending email out on rh8 and rh9, do you startup sendmail services? or is there another way? Thanks.

[K.C. Chan]

Guys, here's what I've found. After shutting down sendmail service and monitoring /var/spool/clientqueue. I noticed after a while , emails which are queue on this dir begins to go through. So I am thinking that there may be a system cron job which kicks off and grab them.

[Steven E. Protter]

sendmail -q generally will force the system to try and empty its sendmail queue.

Here are the changes between RH 7.3 and 9.

The version of sendmail was upgraded from 8.11.x to 8.12.x

It is possible that customizations you made to sendmail.cf got squashed, depending on how up upgraded.

sendmail itself will send mail out based on its sendmail.cf file, nssswtich.conf and resolv.conf setup. nsswitch says how to resolve hostnames, resolv.conf says where to go to try and get this information.

sendmail can get mail off the box, whether or not the sendmail daemon is running.

service sendmail status checks the status of the daemon.

There is usefull messaging in /var/log/messages file in case of a configuration failure.

Your best bet is to not copy configuration files such as sendmail.cf from a 7.3 server to a 8/9 server. It won't work, unless no changes have been made to the default 7.3 mail server.

What you have to do is a generic sendmail install, then identify your features and migrate them one at a time to the new serer.

Let me know if I can tell you more.

SEP
graduate of the sendmail school of hard knocks.

[Dave Falloon]

Do you mean system email such as cron errors or sudo failures or do you mean user mail with a mail client such as mozilla or evolution?

If its system mail then you will definately need an MTA on the system to send mail to your main mail server. Sendmail is started on my RH 7.2 boxes by default, you can do the same for your RH 8.0 boxes just add the necessary links in your /etc/rc.d/* directorys.

Dave

[Dave Falloon]

woops nevermind, I guess I took to long to reply and SEP got it.

pls zero both.

Dave

[K.C. Chan]

All,
I do NOT want to start up sendmail as daemon, I just want to be able to sendmail out and let the mail server handles the routes. I've no issue with RH7.X servers. However, I do have issue with RH8 and 9, because of sendmail version 8.12.5-7 which implemented sm-client daemon of sendmail. (I was mistaken previously when I suspected there was a cron job which kick off and dequeue the emails; some one in my group started sendmail manually and grab the queue emails).

Is there any setting in submit.cf file which will allow me to send email with out running sendmail as a daemon? Thanks.

[K.C. Chan]

figured it out, I need to tweak a variable in submit.cf file. Thanks all for your input.