baur@venice.SEDD.TRW.COM (Steven L. Baur) (06/28/90)
I have some questions and observations about the Elm Configure script. The weirdest one is the combination of the questions about whether you will run the resulting binaries on multiple machines and whether the hostname should be compiled in. Configure asks the latter question after you have already answered Yes to the former. This is probably a bug, but maybe unavoidable. Who runs Elm on just one machine, and wants everything (including ~ pathnames) hardcoded? Are there any installations out there that *have* to have the hostname hardcoded? The wording of that question (present in the Dave Taylor days) sounds like he had an axe to grind somewhere. Interesting is the fact that the domainname is hardcoded into the configuration regardless, so I guess this precludes copied binaries of elm into different e-mail domains. This has some significance (to me) because I cannot put out binaries for anonymous FTP within trw.com. Does anybody care about this? Just asking. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." -- steve baur@venice.SEDD.TRW.COM
taylor@limbo.Intuitive.Com (Dave Taylor) (07/03/90)
Steven L. Baur of TRW writes: > Are there any installations out there that *have* to have the hostname > hardcoded? The wording of that question (present in the Dave Taylor days) > sounds like he had an axe to grind somewhere. Well, I'm confused. I just looked over the Configure.sh script that was in the last "Dave Taylor days" release (I like the sound of that! :-) and I can't find anything to do with hardcoded hostnames. All that I can find that might be related is the question: Are you running a machine where you want to have a domain name appended to the hostname on outbound mail [no] ? and then a test to see if the system has 'gethostname()' available (a call that *wasn't* available on all Unix boxes when I last had my fingers in the distribution, at least. It might be now, however) Also, in the 2.1 release of Elm at least, you could simply tell the program not to build the From: lines at all (DONT_ADD_FROM) and then it would let the lower level mail transport agent put in whatever was appropriate. Which neatly avoids the problem of hardcoded domain names that you refer to... I would be most interested in the 'axe grinding' prompts that you're talking about, Steven! Can you perhaps email me a copy of that bit of the configure script? Straight from the stables, -- Dave Taylor Intuitive Systems Mountain View, California taylor@limbo.intuitive.com or {uunet!}{decwrl,apple}!limbo!taylor
edwin@praxis.cs.ruu.nl (Edwin Kremer) (07/03/90)
In <642@venice.SEDD.TRW.COM> baur@venice.SEDD.TRW.COM (Steven L. Baur) writes: | I have some questions and observations about the Elm Configure script. | Who runs Elm on just one machine, and wants everything (including | ~ pathnames) hardcoded? We do ;-) Actually, we are of course running Elm on a lot of machines, but one subset of that is a HP cluster with 31 diskless clients. In HP's propriatary diskless protocol, all clients see *exactly* the same filesystem as the server (unlike Sun's solution). In this situation you can speak about "one system" and that's why we've all the pathnames hardcoded. | Are there any installations out there that *have* to have the hostname | hardcoded? Yes, there are ;-] Same environment as above: none of the diskless clients are running a sendmail daemon, so none of them will accept mail from another system. The only system that does, is the HP cluster server. In this situation it's very annoying to have the name of a diskless client machine appear in the "From:" header line. What we want is that all diskless clients pretend that they are the cluster server, so we really need hardcoding the hostname of the server. (Yes, I know this can be fixed with sendmail too!) hope this helps, --[ Edwin ]-- -- Edwin Kremer (SysAdm), Dept. of Computer Science, Utrecht University Padualaan 14, P.O. Box 80.089, 3508 TB Utrecht, The Netherlands Telephone: +31-30-534104 | UUCP: ...!uunet!mcsun!hp4nl!ruuinf!edwin Telefax : +31-30-513791 | Email: edwin@cs.ruu.nl [131.211.80.5]
peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) (07/04/90)
In article <642@venice.SEDD.TRW.COM> baur@venice.sedd.trw.com (Steven L. Baur) writes: > Are there any installations out there that *have* to have the hostname > hardcoded? The wording of that question (present in the Dave Taylor days) > sounds like he had an axe to grind somewhere. (raises hand) We have a network of some 30 machines that look like one machine to mail. I have had to make lots of changes to elm 2.2 to get it to work in this environment. I don't plan on upgrading to 2.3 in the near term. -- Peter da Silva. `-_-' +1 713 274 5180. <peter@ficc.ferranti.com>
jwas@PacBell.COM (Joe Wasik) (07/04/90)
In article <642@venice.SEDD.TRW.COM> baur@venice.sedd.trw.com (Steven L. Baur) writes: >"If it ain't broke, don't fix it." "If it ain't perfect, improve it." -- Joe Wasik - PacBell, 2600 Camino Ramon, 4e750, San Ramon, CA 94583 415-823-2422 jwas@PacBell.COM or {att,bellcore,sun,ames,pyramid}!pacbell!pbhyf!jwas "Consitution, ... Shmoshtitution" -- Jesse Helms (interpreted).
les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) (07/06/90)
In article <KZE4TMD@xds13.ferranti.com> peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes: >We have a network of some 30 machines that look like one machine to mail. >I have had to make lots of changes to elm 2.2 to get it to work in this >environment. I don't plan on upgrading to 2.3 in the near term. Can you explain a bit more about how you did this and what problems you encountered? I'm considering something like this, perhaps using smail 3.1 set up to lie in both the From_ and From: lines, and using an alias file to resolve all user addreses. As far as I can tell, this would be transparent to the MUA (what did you have to do to ELM?). Smail 3.1 can understand multiple names for the local host so there should be no problem in accepting messages in local form or to the common name and delivering to the specific machine from the alias list. The main question I have is whether it would be better to modify smail to be able to put different things on the From_ line, depending on the destination, or to change all our external uucp connections to use the MYNAME= feature of HDB uucp to actually look like a single machine from the outside? Les Mikesell les@chinet.chi.il.us
peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) (07/06/90)
In article <KZE4TMD@xds13.ferranti.com> peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes: > We have a network of some 30 machines that look like one machine to mail. In article <1990Jul5.175844.141@chinet.chi.il.us> les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) writes: > Can you explain a bit more about how you did this and what problems > you encountered? The main problems hae been due to the fact that the C compiler we have is broken. For the elm part of things, I compiled it with a fixed host name and have it running through smail 2.5. I have smail 2.5 modified to insist that all machines on the Xenix network are really "ficc.ferranti.com". I have a GLOBALNAME define that is referenced in headers.c in 3 places: in generating the default To and From lines, and where it checks for DOMAIN and hostdomain to strip them off. Then I have a "users" file :include:ed from aliases that maps the user name to a real user@system name. I also hacked smail 2.5 to grok the % hack. > The main question I have is whether it would be better to modify > smail to be able to put different things on the From_ line, depending > on the destination, or to change all our external uucp connections to > use the MYNAME= feature of HDB uucp to actually look like a single machine > from the outside? All our external UUCP connections are through a single machine. I have smail feeding a program (currently a shell script) in /usr/lib/smail/router that figures what actual link to send mail through (network, internal UUCP, or external UUCP). -- Peter da Silva. `-_-' +1 713 274 5180. <peter@ficc.ferranti.com>
baur@venice.SEDD.TRW.COM (Steven L. Baur) (07/07/90)
From article <935@limbo.Intuitive.Com>, by taylor@limbo.Intuitive.Com (Dave Taylor): > Steven L. Baur of TRW writes: >> Are there any installations out there that *have* to have the hostname >> hardcoded? The wording of that question (present in the Dave Taylor days) >> sounds like he had an axe to grind somewhere. > Well, I'm confused. I just looked over the Configure.sh script that > was in the last "Dave Taylor days" release (I like the sound of that! :-) > and I can't find anything to do with hardcoded hostnames. I stand corrected, sorry. In e-mail to me, Syd attributed the wording of this question to Larry Wall, and Brain Dead UNIX PCs as to the why of having it there in the first place. I misremembered when it first appeared. I knew there was something wierd behind this Configure question, and had forgotten that my first experiences with System V were with a version where you had to relink the kernel to change the hostname (that system is sitting on a shelf collecting dust, alas). -- steve baur@venice.SEDD.TRW.COM
6sigma2@polari.UUCP (Brian Matthews) (07/25/90)
In article <642@venice.SEDD.TRW.COM> baur@venice.sedd.trw.com (Steven L. Baur) writes: |Who runs Elm on just one machine, and wants everything (including |~ pathnames) hardcoded? Me. I've only got one machine, but even if I had a few, I'd trade some additional (and bounded) upfront compile time for some (unbounded) time later. |Are there any installations out there that *have* to have the hostname |hardcoded? For some reason my SVR3/386 insists my hostname is 6sigma.sco.com. I haven't got around to figuring out why, so I hardcoded it to 6sigma for now. I guess that's a political or economic reason :-) -- Brian L. Matthews blm@6sceng.UUCP