stanonik@nprdc.arpa (Ron Stanonik) (02/10/86)
After we run newaliases, the sendmail daemon (running continuously, started with -bd) fails to find some aliases. Apparently the copy of aliases.dir cached in the daemon by the dbm library sometimes becomes outdated after newaliases (if a split occurs). Since our aliases.dir is less than DBLKSIZ, the cached copy is never updated. Restarting the daemon after newaliases cures the problem, but a better solution would probably be to "fix" the dbm library (reread aliases.dir and retry if makdatum fails?). The dbm library seems intended for the case of infrequent updates. Any suggestions? This seems as though it should be a common problem, but I cannot remember seeing it discussed, nor can I find any reference to it in the xinu buglist. Thanks, Ron Stanonik stanonik@nprdc.arpa
chris@umcp-cs.UUCP (Chris Torek) (02/12/86)
The daemon itself should never have the alias file open. Only children of the daemon (SMTP servers) should open it, or independent sendmails (invoked by /usr/ucb/Mail or whatnot). Unfortunately I cannot provide a fix for 4.2 sendmail, since we no longer have it. -- In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 1415) UUCP: seismo!umcp-cs!chris CSNet: chris@umcp-cs ARPA: chris@mimsy.umd.edu
stanonik@nprdc.arpa (Ron Stanonik) (02/19/86)
Thanks to terry@rand-unix.arpa, guyton@rand-unix.arpa, and hoptoad!gnu@lll-crg.arpa. A better solution than monkeying with the dbm library is to change sendmail so that children of the daemon do initaliases themselves. (Recall, this is to cure the problem that the sendmail daemon's notion of the aliases can become out of date after newaliases.) 4.3bsd has done this. Ron Stanonik stanonik@nprdc.arpa