[comp.mail.uucp] How to set up a domain using SMAIL?

fitz@wang.UUCP (Tom Fitzgerald) (10/27/89)

Is it possible to create a well-organized domain using smail?  I've
been trying to do this here, and I keep running into problems since
smail seems to work well only in the .UUCP domain.

Suppose you set up a domain Fnord.COM with a gateway named alpha
(i.e. alpha.Fnord.COM) and a bunch of other machines.  alpha.Fnord.COM
has a full set of UUCP maps and does intelligent routing.

How can machines inside Fnord.COM have the same names as machines in the
UUCP maps without confusing the smail running on alpha?  If there's both
a beta.UUCP and a beta.Fnord.COM, how can smail be taught that mail to
user@beta goes to user@beta.Fnord.COM, and that mail to user@beta.UUCP
goes wherever the UUCP maps tell it to go?

I've looked through the smail and pathalias source enough to know that
either I'm missing something, or this is difficult if not impossible.
Still, I need to be able to do this.  Even if we changed all our system
names to things that aren't in the UUCP maps, there's not guarantee that
tomorrow's map distribution from Rutgers won't have a new node that
duplicates an existing Fnord.COM node.  We -HAVE- to be able to handle
duplicate node names, or we have to register 50 new node names in the
UUCP maps (mega-yuk).

We're using smail 2.5.  Is there anyone out there who has had luck
pulling this off?  Does anyone know if smail 3.* handles this any
differently?

If it looks like smail can't manage this, does anyone know where we
can get source code for sendmail for System V? :-/

---
Tom Fitzgerald   fitz@wang.com          Researching the public's fear of
Wang Labs        ...!uunet!wang!fitz    the unknown since 1953.
Lowell MA, USA   1-508-967-5278

chip@ateng.com (Chip Salzenberg) (10/27/89)

According to fitz@wang.UUCP (Tom Fitzgerald):
>How can machines inside Fnord.COM have the same names as machines in the
>UUCP maps without confusing the smail running on [the gateway]?

As far as I know, there is no simple way to do what you want with Smail 2.5.

Possible solution #1:  Modify Smail to support multiple path files, each of
which is associated with a given domain.  Be sure that the "Fnord.COM" path
file is searched first for unqualified hostnames.

Possible solution #2:  Modify Smail to qualify unqualified hostnames before
doing path lookup; then if the qualified hostname isn't found, search for
the original unqualified hostname.

>Does anyone know if smail 3.* handles this any differently?

Smail 3 supports multiple path files.
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