lauriec@qmw.ac.uk (Laurie Cuthbert) (12/20/90)
Please pass this to whoever looks after UK-sendmail =================================================== I would be grateful if you could provide a little bit of advice and information on the UK sendmail package. However, first it would probably be helpful if I were to give you some information on our setup in Electronic Engineering at QMW The structure is as follows: uk.ac.qmw [ICM 3980 mainframe] site mail server | ---GREY-BOOK MAIL | ethernet/x25 links | uk.ac.qmw.eng.oak [Acorn R140] dept mail server | ---"ETHER" MAIL | ethernet | uk.ac.qmw.eng.<host> [Departmental unix hosts] The principles behind the system are: - we all use the address uk.ac.qmw and the site mailer takes care of distributing incoming mail - we do not maintain NRS tables on the dept mailer because we pass all outgoing mail to the site mailer to relay for us - we stamp all outgoing mail as from uk.ac.qmw In general I believe this is a fairly common structure, the problem being that we have to use grey book mail between the dept and site mailers and the UK sendmail configuration assumes that all JANET sites are directly connected, ie the NRS table is maintained on the grey-book mailer. This is not what we want as we only maintain a sub-set of addresses. We have had considerable help from Scott Larnock at Edinburgh in getting this going and it does work. Scott did a hand edit on the sendmail.cf file for the dept mailer (oak) so that all uk. mail is sent to the mainframe for onward relaying. However, we feel that it is not fair to keep asking Scott and we must learn more about sendmail ourselves; we have indeed done some tinkering - for instance outgoing janet mail from OAK is stamped uk.ac.qmw (so a "reply" comes in via the site) whereas local mail using the ether mailer is stamped uk.ac.qmw.eng.oak so a "reply" goes directly to the machine and not out to the mainframe and back. From this experience and reading the README files with the distribution for UK sendmail 1.4 there are a couple of specific points I have. It would also be helpful if you could direct me to any reading on the structure of the sendmail.cf file. Specific points: 1) How can I change the MAKE in the so that uk. sites in the janet mailer do not default to the assumption that they are directly connected. What I would like to do is to have ONLY specific sites taken to be connected directly (these would be machines such as qmw.cs which is local but has to be mailed using grey book) - I would then put uk in the top.dom file to be relayed via the site mailer. 2) On oak I can vary the From field to show either the site of host address depending on which mailer is used. However, I cannot see how to do this on the slave dept machines because they only use the ether mailer - is it possible to put a definition of the From field in a couple of the rulesets so that it is different depending upon whether the mail is local or external. I do not know enough about the rulesets or the internal variables in the file to see how to do that. If you can provide some help I would be grateful. Regards Laurie Cuthbert
lauriec@qmw.ac.uk (Laurie Cuthbert) (01/18/91)
Did anyone manage to answer this enquiry? You may have tried to reply round the New Year but we had electrical rewiring and the network was shut down. ----------------------------cut here-------------- Please pass this to whoever looks after UK-sendmail =================================================== I would be grateful if you could provide a little bit of advice and information on the UK sendmail package. However, first it would probably be helpful if I were to give you some information on our setup in Electronic Engineering at QMW The structure is as follows: uk.ac.qmw [ICM 3980 mainframe] site mail server | ---GREY-BOOK MAIL | ethernet/x25 links | uk.ac.qmw.eng.oak [Acorn R140] dept mail server | ---"ETHER" MAIL | ethernet | uk.ac.qmw.eng.<host> [Departmental unix hosts] The principles behind the system are: - we all use the address uk.ac.qmw and the site mailer takes care of distributing incoming mail - we do not maintain NRS tables on the dept mailer because we pass all outgoing mail to the site mailer to relay for us - we stamp all outgoing mail as from uk.ac.qmw In general I believe this is a fairly common structure, the problem being that we have to use grey book mail between the dept and site mailers and the UK sendmail configuration assumes that all JANET sites are directly connected, ie the NRS table is maintained on the grey-book mailer. This is not what we want as we only maintain a sub-set of addresses. We have had considerable help from Scott Larnock at Edinburgh in getting this going and it does work. Scott did a hand edit on the sendmail.cf file for the dept mailer (oak) so that all uk. mail is sent to the mainframe for onward relaying. However, we feel that it is not fair to keep asking Scott and we must learn more about sendmail ourselves; we have indeed done some tinkering - for instance outgoing janet mail from OAK is stamped uk.ac.qmw (so a "reply" comes in via the site) whereas local mail using the ether mailer is stamped uk.ac.qmw.eng.oak so a "reply" goes directly to the machine and not out to the mainframe and back. From this experience and reading the README files with the distribution for UK sendmail 1.4 there are a couple of specific points I have. It would also be helpful if you could direct me to any reading on the structure of the sendmail.cf file. Specific points: 1) How can I change the MAKE in the so that uk. sites in the janet mailer do not default to the assumption that they are directly connected. What I would like to do is to have ONLY specific sites taken to be connected directly (these would be machines such as qmw.cs which is local but has to be mailed using grey book) - I would then put uk in the top.dom file to be relayed via the site mailer. 2) On oak I can vary the From field to show either the site of host address depending on which mailer is used. However, I cannot see how to do this on the slave dept machines because they only use the ether mailer - is it possible to put a definition of the From field in a couple of the rulesets so that it is different depending upon whether the mail is local or external. I do not know enough about the rulesets or the internal variables in the file to see how to do that. If you can provide some help I would be grateful. Regards Laurie Cuthbert