jmm@eci386.uucp (John Macdonald) (05/27/90)
Is there a good reference anywhere for sendmail? (I checked, O'Reilly does not have a Nutshell book that covers it.) I'm trying to use it for the first time to set up a site with two systems (a Sun 3 and a MIPS) connected by Ethernet&TCP/IP, where one of them has a modem and uucp connection to an outside system. I have set it up so that the machine with the modem uses TCP/IP for known local machines (currently just the one), delivers local stuff locally, and uses the outside system to resolve anything else. If someone has a sendmail.cf that fits this situation, I'd be happy to receive a copy. (They don't have a domain name yet, but that is no problem for the moment.) I have the Sun sysadmin manual, and it has a fairly long section on sendmail, but it is missing a lot of connection between the description of low-level items in the sendmail.cf file and the high-level description of the sorts of things you can do with sendmail. At the moment, my problem it that lots of large messages just sit in the queue and are never passed on, in one case to lmail (it came from a remote machine) and in the other cases to uux. There are some descriptions of options that control penalty factors for priority, but never a description of what priority really means (in terms of how it affects *when* a piece of mail will actually get processed - it does say that a higher priority number means a heaavier penalty. (In actual operation it generally seems to choosing between three choices - a fair number of small messages are processed immediately, a small number of "intermediate" sized messages are queued for a while and then processed, and a large number of large messages get queued forever (a week so far)). I have also tried using the debug command line option, trying to run it against a specific queued element, hoping to get so idea of why the items a staying on the queue, but that just seems to debug the non-existent message that it assumes that I'm piping in to it, and complains that there is no destination specified. The reference in the manual that says "debug is very useful, if you have source code you look around to find out what the codes and levels actually mean" is rather discouraging to someone without source code, but I just turned on everything and waded through a huge amount of extraneous blather before I could figure that out. (Source code would have allowed me to try and figure out the queueing penalty algorithm too.) I'm strongly tempted to dump sendmail and just use smail 2.5, but if someone can convince me otherwise... -- Algol 60 was an improvment on most | John Macdonald of its successors - C.A.R. Hoare | jmm@eci386