gk5g+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU (Gary Keim) (07/16/90)
Date: Mon, 16 Jul 1990 12:04:10 MET DST From: Haavard Eidnes <he@idt.unit.no> Hello, ATK maintainers. I'm the local person responsible for our mail system, and now I need to participate in installing AMS. In connection with this I feel the need for getting answered a couple of questions: 1) Is it possible to run AMS user agents and send/receive multi-media mail using this software while running a mail transport system using sendmail? 2) If the answer to 1) is negative, is it possible to run the AMS transport system while continuing to run sendmail? I'm not ready to chuck out sendmail just to run AMS, since a lot of people depend on our mail systems operation, and I don't feel confident that AMS will integrate easy with our other mail user agents and servers. We use POP2 and POP3 on Macs and on PCs, notification service for Macs, and have a central mail host that takes care of mail delivery. On top of that, we have a "happy" mix of SunOS 3.4 and SunOS 4.0, and we're only going to install ATK on the SunOS 4.0 machines (too much work to do for 3.4, since we're about to phase out 3.4 anyway). - H}vard
Craig_Everhart@TRANSARC.COM (07/16/90)
Yes, it's possible to run AMS user agents and then send&receive multi-media mail. That's how most sites use Messages. Read the setup.help file reasonably carefully to describe what you should put in your AndrewSetup file. Craig
he@idt.unit.no (Haavard Eidnes) (07/17/90)
Thanks for your answer. I don't think I explained my current setup and my wishes clearly enough. This is an attempt to rectify this. What I wish to acheive is to a) be able to send and receive multi-media mail locally. b) continue to run our main mail system based on sendmail, accessible from all our machines (including the AMS Post Office server(s) that I may install). c) connect our current sendmail-based mail system to the new AMS mail system so that mail can be sent from one and received by the other system. > Yes, it's possible to run AMS user agents and then send&receive > multi-media mail. That's how most sites use Messages. That's what I assumed. However: The documentation seems to assume that a site is going to completely switch to using AMDS, AMS and associated software, and I'm not ready to make that leap just yet. (For one thing, I have quite a number of active local users who use our mail system on a daily basis, and who rely on its operation. Furthermore, they're accustomed to the mail user agents we have installed so far, and if I'm to propose that they all switch I'm not going to be very popular. Additionaly, we run POP2 and POP3 servers, which also complicate this situation.) There seems to be very little mention (as far as I've seen) of how a local mail system based on sendmail and assorted ordinary user agents are to coexsist with AMS/AMDS. Yes, I did read overhead/util/lib/setup.help, as well as the relevant files in DEFAULT_ANDREWDIR_ENV/doc/ams, and I still have a couple of (hopefully concrete enough) unanswered questions: 1) Is it required to also run the AMDS (delivery system) to be able to send and receive multi-media mail, or will (the real) sendmail be able to work as a transport system for AMS multi-media mail? My guess is that I'll have to use AMDS. If sendmail is incapable of performing this task, I have to (or should) somehow connect the two mail systems (AMDS and sendmail). 2) Can AMDS and sendmail coexsist (on the same machine)? There seems to be a sendmail replacement (what's it there for?) and a /bin/mail replacement which annoys the local postmaster by sending a bounce for each message that's sent/delivered via /bin/mail. Clearly, we don't want to be using these programs. 3) Can an AMS user agent receive both AMS as well as ordinary mail (delivered with the real /bin/mail and dropped off in /usr/spool/mail)? When it comes to choosing an "Installation name", I don't see what would be the correct/convenient choice for our site. In order to get some advice here, I need to describe our current setup. We currently have one central mail machine that performs all mail delivery (both local and remote), called loke.idt.unit.no. The sendmail at that host transforms most addresses of the form user@host.idt.unit.no to user@idt.unit.no before sending the mail onwards (we maintain a list of the hosts that are to be treated like this). All our other sendmail-based hosts have a stripped-down sendmail.cf that just forwards the mail to our central mail host, and mount /usr/spool/mail with NFS from the mail host. Appropriate MX records are set up pointing from idt.unit.no to our mail host and its backup. It seems apparent that we should name our AMS / AMDS system within the idt.unit.no domain (since that's our department's domain name), and the installation document seems to assume that: - gethostname(2) will return a fully qualified domain name. It desn't (and won't) at our site. - that the hostname should be used as the name of the installation. This will interfere with the use of sendmail on that host. Thus: 4) Is it possible to allocate a "pseudo" domain name (eg. ams.idt.unit.no) to one of our hosts to be used as the AMS installation name? How do I insure that mail from the outside to this address is injected into the AMS, ie. what program should be run to deliver the message? I can modify the involved sendmail.cf's to acheive this. Or does any of the AMS/AMDS programs listen on the SMTP port of a machine to receive mail from the outside? (Again, this would severely impact the operation of our sendmail based mail system.) 5) Is it possible to use a workstation or server that doesn't run AFS as a Post Office server for AMDS? The "Hardware" section of doc/ams/AMDS.ins seems to suggest this is a requirement, as well as the installation description for the post office machines (the description there is fairly AFS-centric). This, however, is in contradiction with the description in doc/ams/AMDS.ovr 6) Do I need the modified "cron" or "su", as well as "package"? I sure hope not, since all I have is a normal binary-only SunOS license, and I couldn't find "package" offhand as a part of the X11 ATK distribution. If some of these issues/questions/explanations are still unclear, please indicate so, and I will try to explain further. TIA & regards, Havard Eidnes, Postmaster &c @idt.unit.no, Uninett employee, ... Division of Computer Systems and Telematics, Norwegian Institute of Technology
Craig_Everhart@TRANSARC.COM (07/18/90)
AMDS is a local delivery agent: it essentially replaces /bin/mail for purposes of putting a piece of mail into a local recipient's in-box. When coupled with AFS, it does have one property of a long-haul mail system: it can deliver mail to users at a remote AFS site if that remote AFS site has indicated its willingness to cooperate with such attempts (by indicating that it also runs AMDS). You don't need AMDS to send and receive multi-media mail. The multi-media nature of AMS/ATK mail is represented just fine within the confines of RFC822 (of which BSD Sendmail is (part of) one implementation). This message is going out in multi-media form to several recipients of the info-andrew list, most of whom are not receiving it via AMDS. You can later switch to using AMDS, but you don't have to, and there's not much rationale in doing this unless AMDS is helping you deal with a distributed file system of some sort. AMDS and sendmail generally don't coexist on the same machine, though AMDS uses some external mechanism (sendmail, by default) for its long-haul transport/SMTP needs that it can't itself meet. The /bin/mail and /usr/lib/sendmail replacements are essentially to be installed only when you have AMDS running on your site, you don't run sendmail or /bin/mail on most machines, and you want to trap all the old uses of these programs that are buried in lots of applications that think they know how to create and send mail. AMS user agents handle both ordinary and multi-media mail just fine. Multi-media mail is tagged as such via the Content-type: header (RFC 1049). In non-AMDS mode, AMS will send such messages via a configurable path name to an executable (default ``/usr/lib/sendmail'') and will retrieve messages from a file with another configurable name (default ``/usr/spool/mail'' or ``/usr/mail''). I don't think you'll have to worry a lot about choosing an installation name, though from your description you'd be happy with ``idt.unit.no'' (since you would expect any central service to handle mail to ``anyname@idt.unit.no''). You can set the ThisDomainSuffix variable in AndrewSetup to something like ``idt.unit.no'' if you want From: lines to look like foo@bar.idt.unit.no (user foo on local machine bar). I think most of your questions have the same answer: you don't really want to be running AMDS in your environment. Craig