itkin@mrspoc.Transact.COM (Steven M. List) (05/14/91)
I admit that I'm not a wizard with Smail. It works wonderfully and I'm
exceptionally glad that we've got it. Now I have a small challenge -
I've moved a user from one host to another. All within our own little
domain. At some point the old host will go away. So...
I'm trying to figure out how to have mail that arrives for:
user@host1.Transact.COM
go to:
user@host2.Transact.COM
without first going to the original host and being forwarded (either by
alias or .forward).
Eventually, I want to redirect ALL mail that is addressed to the original
host to an alternate host. Basically, what I want to be able to do is:
Intercept ALL mail for our domain on the main receiving host (mrspoc),
strip off the host address information, and then send it to the
appropriate place either based on the aliases file or some other
mechanism.
I've read about Smail's Routers and Transports and Directors and Methods
and I just don't think I've got it all. Can anyone help me get this
set up?
Thanks!
Steven
P.S. The version of SMAIL we have is "/\=-/\ Smail3.1.17.5 #17.6"
--
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
: Steven List @ Transact Software, Inc. :^>~ :
: Chairman, Unify User Group of Northern California :
: itkin@Transact.COM :lyndon@cs.athabascau.ca (Lyndon Nerenberg) (05/15/91)
itkin@mrspoc.Transact.COM (Steven M. List) writes: >I'm trying to figure out how to have mail that arrives for: > user@host1.Transact.COM >go to: > user@host2.Transact.COM >without first going to the original host and being forwarded (either by >alias or .forward). If it's only for a few users, you're better off accepting the extra hop and just using an alias. You could do it with some hairy processing in routers and directors, but the hit on the gateway would be significantly higher than if you just used aliases. >Eventually, I want to redirect ALL mail that is addressed to the original >host to an alternate host. Basically, what I want to be able to do is: This is much easier. To alias hosts, just add an entry at the TOP of the routers file that does a pathalias lookup on a file containing your host aliases. Something like this will do it: host_alias: driver = pathalias, always, # Override any other routes transport = smtp; # ... or whatever file = host-aliases, # in smail ${LIBDIR} proto = lsearch Then, in the file ${LIBDIR}/host-aliases, add this line: host1.transact.com host2.transact.com!%s This will redirect all mail for host1 to host2. Given your description in the posting, it sounds to me like what you really want to do is hide all (or most) of your machines under your domain name. This is a good way to do things, since it simplifies your mailer administration tasks a *lot*. Here's how we do it ... We have a number of hosts under the cs.athabascau.ca domain. Once machine (aupair.cs) is the gateway for this sub-domain. We have an MX record for cs.athabascau.ca that points at aupair. We also have MX records for all (well, most) of the rest of the machines in the cs sub-domain that point to aupair. These machines are also configured to punt any mail for a "local" user to the gateway (aupair). The result is that no matter what machine you send e-mail from, if it is for a user in the cs sub-domain, it gets forwarded to the gateway. On the gateway we maintain a master alias file for all users with accounts in the sub-domain. These aliases point to the actual machine the user reads their mail on. Of course, a little bit of magic is used :-) If you look at the smail(5) man page, you will see that there is a director called "real-user." In our alias file, we enter each user as follows: lyndon: real-lyndon@<machine>.cs.athabascau.ca The non-gateway machines will perform local delivery to an address of real-<user>, although this is not (was not :-) known to our users, bypassing any .forward file they might have installed (preventing forwarding loops). We also do things like mount the gateway machines /usr/spool/mail on a lot of our hosts via NFS. For those hosts, even the real-user driver is disabled, and all "local" mail goes to the gateway for local delivery. Having done all of that, we have an environment where most, if not all, hosts are equivelent as far as local e-mail delivery is concerned. This lets us perform the final step. On all the machines following this model, we set the visible_name attribute to cs.athabascau.ca. Therefore, all mail originating from any of these hosts shows the same return address in the From: header. Any replies to this mail will automatically be sent to the gateway (modulo certain braindead System V UA's) for processing. Also, the users are told to specify "user@cs.athabascau.ca" as their e-mail address, regardless of what machine they are on. The result is centralized control of e-mail with very little administrative burden on the administrators (or users). [ I hope this description is reasonably clear. I wrote it in a big hurry as I'm late for a meeting. If there is enough interest, I can shar up our config files and post them. ] [ Also, note that followups are directed to comp.mail.misc. This has nothing to do with Elm ... ] -- Lyndon Nerenberg VE6BBM / Computing Services / Athabasca University atha!cs.athabascau.ca!lyndon || lyndon@cs.athabascau.ca Packet: ve6bbm@ve6bbm.ab.can.noam The only thing open about OSF is their mouth. --Chuck Musciano