greg@carnivore.tamu.edu (Greg Economides) (05/22/91)
I am a sendmail novice. I have sendmail running on our Sun Sparc 1+. There are a couple of machines that people in our group send mail to regularly that we need (at least it seems like we need) to route through uunet.uu.net. Is it possible/wise/a-good-idea to put a rule in the sendmail.cf file to rewrite address of the form: someone@this.dang.machine.com to be of the form: someone%this.dang.machine.com@uunet.uu.net so that the users don't have to do their own routing like this? Is there a better solution to the problem? It seems that, mostly, the machines with a .com domain are the ones that sendmail has trouble handling without sending it through uunet. Could it be that some other problem is causing this behavior? Suggestions, insite and hand-holding are greatly appreciated. Pax, -- Greg Economides "This sentence is false" Technical Lab Coordinator Texas A&M University -- Biosystems Modelling Group Internet: greg@carnivore.tamu.edu
rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) (05/22/91)
In article <16400@helios.TAMU.EDU> greg@carnivore.tamu.edu (Greg Economides) writes: >uunet.uu.net. Is it possible/wise/a-good-idea to put a rule in the >sendmail.cf file to rewrite address of the form: > someone@this.dang.machine.com > >to be of the form: > > someone%this.dang.machine.com@uunet.uu.net > >so that the users don't have to do their own routing like this? Is there That is a terrible idea, for two reasons: 1. You may be unnecessarily burdening uunet.uu.net 2. It is a hack partial solution at best. Your real problem is that you are using a version of 'sendmail' which does not understand MX records. Solutions: Easy:- Find a host on your campus (Texas A & M ??) which can handle these addresses, and set up you mail system to relay ALL outbound mail through that host. Obviously you must get permission first, and if so, the admin of the relay system can probably help you with the setup. General:- Look in /usr/lib. You will find there are two executables with names that look like sendmail. One is called 'sendmail' and the other is called 'sendmail.mx'. You will need to start using the second one. cd /usr/lib mv sendmail sendmail.nomx ln sendmail.mx sendmail Now do some tests on your 'sendmail.cf'. As a result of the different version the automatic definition of $w and $j may have changed. You will have to make the needed adjustments so that it works correctly. When you have it working, kill and restart the sendmail daemon. (I do assume you have access to a nameserver). -- =*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science <rickert@cs.niu.edu> Northern Illinois Univ. DeKalb, IL 60115 +1-815-753-6940
rbraun@spdcc.COM (Rich Braun) (05/22/91)
rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes: > Easy:- Find a host on your campus (Texas A & M ??) which can handle these > addresses, and set up you mail system to relay ALL outbound mail > through that host. Neil, could you post a sample MX description line which would accomplish this for non-Internet-connected sites? The 'named' documentation I have, frankly, sucks. I could easily enough figure out what the NIC would put in to the Internet-wide name server descriptions to set up one or two systems as relays for my site, but I can't figure out what my local name server needs to know in order to set up one of the systems as a relay for non-local mail. I'd also like to hear from anyone who is using SCO Unix systems on a LAN, who has had to set up e-mail. SCO sets things up to use MMDF, which I have found is the only known software more complex than sendmail. But MMDF, as far as I can figure out, is not compatible with sendmail, so I ended up setting things up to use both. And I'm rather confused. Thanks, -rich
rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) (05/22/91)
In article <7604@spdcc.SPDCC.COM> rbraun@spdcc.COM (Rich Braun) writes: >rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes: >> Easy:- Find a host on your campus (Texas A & M ??) which can handle these >> addresses, and set up you mail system to relay ALL outbound mail >> through that host. > >Neil, could you post a sample MX description line which would accomplish >this for non-Internet-connected sites? The 'named' documentation I have, My comments above assumed the question (from TAMU.EDU) originated at an Internet site. If you are not directly on Internet, the best advice is for you to find a willing host on Internet through which you can forward with UUCP. When you do this you are at the mercy of your connecting links, and the way they rewrite (or destroy) your address. If your UUCP neighbors destructively munge your addresses so that they are unuseable when they reach Internet hosts, it might be worthwhile paying the costs to have a more reliable UUCP feed. If it is possible to hand address messages to reach Internet sites, it should be possible to arrange for sendmail to do it automatically. However it might not be particularly easy. If you are comfortable with installing new software, an effective approach might be to pick up the IDA version of sendmail from uxc.cso.uiuc.edu (or probably available on uunet). The support for pathalias output allows a lot of automatic routing through the UUCP maps. You should be able to use this without having to hack on 'sendmail.cf'. Over the last few months Paul Pomes, at UIUC, has done a lot of work on the code to improve compatibility with a variety of flavors of Unix. For other approaches, I have limited experience. It is always possible to concoct your own modified version of the UUCP mailer, with its own rewrite rules, to do the routing for you. It would be nice if vendors supplied versions which could be easily used. My main experience has been with SunOS and with SGI. On the SunOS system, you can use 'sendmail.main.cf' as your configuration. If you have your domainmane and hostname setup as Sun recommends, then you mostly need to define the relay mailer to be 'smartuucp', and the relay host to be your uucp link to Internet. Unfortunately, the standard Sun setup is such that the return address from out Geology Department finishes up looking something like 'earth!geol.niu.edu!user' which my mailer would normally reformat into 'earth!geol.niu.edu!user@mp.cs.niu.edu', instead of the much more friendly 'user@geol.niu.edu'. It would have been possible to correct this on the Sun with some modifications to 'sendmail.cf'. However, since I didn't want to have to repeatedly do this every time a new SunOS upgrade is installed, I wound up modifying my own sendmail to do some pruning of superfluous routing on the return address. On the SGI system in our Chemistry department, we only had to follow the instructions in 'sendmail.cf' to define my host's UUCP name as the Internet relaying host, and everything immediately dropped into place and the system started providing good header and return addresses. (Constructing an 'expect/send' script for a uucp login was a different, and painful matter, though). If you are more than one UUCP hop from Internet, things are tricky. In the best of worlds, you have a UUCP neighbor who has already solved the problem of routing Internet addresses. In that case you should only need to get the mail to that host. In less favorable circumstances you will need to construct routes through UUCP maze yourself. It is hard to give good advice, except to look into IDA, and/or to look into getting yourself a direct UUCP link to a well run host on Internet. -- =*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science <rickert@cs.niu.edu> Northern Illinois Univ. DeKalb, IL 60115 +1-815-753-6940