[comp.unix.questions] sendmail alias strangeness

mkhaw@teknowledge-vaxc.ARPA (Mike Khaw) (12/03/87)

Today one of our systems people just added a number of aliases to
/usr/lib/aliases, ran newaliases, and all of a sudden sendmail no
longer recognizes some of the old mail aliases.  /usr/lib/sendmail -bv
thinks these aliases are OK, but if I try to telnet to port 25 to talk
to the smtp server and use "rcpt to:" it comes back with "User unknown".

I wrote the following short program, which verified that the "broken"
aliases are in fact in the aliases dbm file, and are what we think
they should be:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <dbm.h>

#define MAXKEY	20

main()
{
	datum	key,
		content;

	char	inbuf[MAXKEY + 1];

	dbminit("/usr/lib/aliases");

	while (printf("key? "), gets(inbuf) != NULL)
	  {
		key.dptr = inbuf;
		key.dsize = strlen(inbuf) + 1;
		content = fetch(key);
	        if (content.dptr == NULL)
			printf("oops\n");
		else
			printf("%s:\"%s\"\n", key.dptr, content.dptr);
	  }
}

What's going on?  (This is Ultrix 1.2 / VAX; sendmail identifies itself as
version 4.12/4.7)

Thanks,
Mike Khaw
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