marc@apollo.COM (Marc Gibian) (06/16/89)
There have been a number of postings recently regarding sendmail
and sr10.1. I would like to make a few comments.
1. It is well understood that the default sendmail.cf and the
template configuration files are rather primitive. This is
something that the project is working on, though I can not
predict when we will be releasing the improved file(s).
2. Many initial problems with sendmail tend to be due to bad or
missing alias databases, and/or bad frozen configuration files.
The first thing you need to do if you find sendmail is crashing,
is to regenerate the alias database (/usr/lib/sendmail -bi) and,
if you have a /usr/lib/sendmail.fc file, either regenerate it
(/usr/lib/sendmail -bz) or delete it. The next release of the
OS (sr10.2) should prevent getting hung up with bad
/usr/lib/sendmail.fc files, and we are exploring ways we can
prevent the alias database problems. At minimum, it certainly
would help if we issued more informative error messages instead
of having sendmail crash on these problems.
3. It is the recommendation of the project to try to avoid using
linked /usr/spool/mail as a way to simplify configuring unix
mail in a large network. The main problem with doing this is
the lack of code in all the unix mail programs to cope with
intermittent interruption of access to the /usr/spool/mail
directory, usually caused by network interruptions. If your
network is stable enough, or small enough, that you do not
encounter this type of behavior, or you are willing to cope
with the problems caused by these interruptions, then go
ahead and use linked /usr/spool/mail directories.
4. The email project is exploring ways of reducing the effort required
to install and administer unix mail on large heterogeneous networks.
I believe that the result of this effort will address most of the
issues that have been raised in the various unix mail discussions
that have been taking place in this news group.
Marc S. Gibian
PE - email project
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