SUMMARY: sendmail.cf and Solaris 2.4

From: Fausto Almeida (fausto@gia.ist.utl.pt)
Date: Thu Jun 29 1995 - 14:47:41 CDT


Hello Sun Managers

My apologies for taking so long to post a summary but I only got things to work
a few days ago.

Thanks to all you that replied:
 Simon-Bernard Drolet <droletb@CCG.RNCan.gc.ca>
 Gavin Maltby <gavin@DURBAN.VECTOR.CO.ZA>
 "Douglas L. Acker" <dla@se05.wg2.waii.com>
 rene@iusti.univ-mrs.fr (Mr Rene Occelli)
 x092306@hyperion.LANL.GOV (Jerry Weber CIC-2)

Simon and Gavin sugested to use sendmail 8.6.12. but that would have meant to
change everything in the net of the 2.4 machine.

A temporary solution that I used was proosed by Jerry and involved configuring
the mail tool.

Douglas proposed using ddn as my gateway mailer intead of ether. I could not
test it.

Finaly Rene had exactly the same problem I had and his explanations (that I
include) provided me with the insight to solve the problem.
At first I could not get his solution to work because I use NIS and the mail
directory is mounted using automounter (NIS map auto.direct). I had to quit
using automounter and do a normal mount to get things to work properly.

Here is Rene's reply:
>
> Hi,
> I have had the same problem on mysystem. The Nis server running 4.1.3
> and the Nis/mail client 2.4
> When a mail was send by the 2.4 machine the From field was wrong.
>
> I've contacted the sun migration group at migration@canada.sun.com
> who helped me to solve this problem
>
> Im my case the problem was that the mail server has two ethernet cards and
> two names (leila for local) and iusti.univ-mrs.fr for the mailing
> But I mounted the /var/spool/mail directory like this on my solaris machine
>
> Lisa:/var/spool/mail - /var/mail .....
>
> On other machine runinng 4.1.3 this cause no problem. The problem
> appears only on 2.4 machines.
>
> Below the response on the migration group
>
> Remote mode has changed with Solaris 2.3. It no longer just throws all
> email at the remote server. It tries to resolve local aliases, before
> sending to the remote server. A new internal sendmail variable, $k, is
> used in sendmail.cf in rulesets 11, 22, and 33 to rewrite the From line
> so that the outgoing email has the server's hostname as the reply host.
> this allows direct delivery of local email, while keeping the hostname
> insensitivity of using a mailhost.
>
> However, since your machine has multiple interfaces, your NFS mount has
> the name leila as the hostname for the NFS mount. This causes the From
> line to have user@leila. Try
> Lisa# mount -F nfs iusti.univ-mrs.fr:/var/spool/mail /var/mail
>
> This change to remote mode was deliberate and had a number of reasons,
> related to customers telling us the old way was problematic.
>
> The difference is between SunOS 5.2 and below
> and 5.3 and above. The implementation of remote mode (always has been a
> Sun thing only, not in the berkeley sendmail) changed when 5.3 was
> released. Since the 4.1.3 sendmail wasn't changed to match the change
> in 5.3, there is now a difference in how the two clients get handled.
> In the 4.1.3 mail client, the client assumes the server will correctly
> rewrite the From address. In the 5.3 mail client, the client assumes
> the server will not rewrite it correctly, and does it itself. This
> causes the problem you are seeing, because the code which determines
> the client's name (running on the client) just looks in mnttab to
> determine the mail server name. Admittedly this is short-sighted, and
> it has been suggested this will not be changed before Solaris 2.6. By
> then, we will all be using sendmail V8, which will hopefully not have
> this remote mode feature. The stock sendmail V8 from Berekeley does not
> have it, but Sun may implement it, like we did in the past.
>
> If you have sunsolve access, I recommend checking out bugid 1119738. It
> describes the changes much better than I can.
>
>
> I tried it and now it WORKS without problem.
> On the ohter hand I have first tried to modified the sendmail.cf file
> on 2.4 machines like this:
> In your /etc/sendmail.cf file you should find a section something like shown
> below.
> --- example starts here ---
>
> #################################################
> #
> # General configuration information
>
> # local domain names
> #
> # These can now be determined from the domainname system call.
> # The first component of the NIS domain name is stripped off unless
> # it begins with a dot or a plus sign.
> # If your NIS domain is not inside the domain name you would like to have
> # appear in your mail headers, add a "Dm" line to define your domain name.
> # The Dm value is what is used in outgoing mail. The Cm values are
> # accepted in incoming mail. By default Cm is set from Dm, but you might
> # want to have more than one Cm line to recognize more than one domain
> # name on incoming mail during a transition.
> # Example:
> # DmCS.Podunk.EDU
> # Cm cs cs.Podunk.EDU
> #
> # known hosts in this domain are obtained from gethostbyname() call
> --- example end here ---
>
> After this section add the following line or change it to be:
>
> Dmiusti.univ-mrs.fr
>
>
>
> THIS don't WORKS.
>
> Only the first change in the mount WORKS.
>
> Hope this aids you
>
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> + Rene OCCELLI +
> + I.U.S.T.I. C.N.R.S. U.M.R. 139 +
> + Av. Esc. Normandie Niemen +
> + 13397 MARSEILLE Cedex 20 France +
> + Tel: (33)91 28 82 08 +
> + Fax: (33)91 28 82 25 +
> + Email: rene@iusti.univ-mrs.fr +
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>

and my original query:
>
>
> Hi,
>
> I've bumped into a problem that I can't solve. I installed Solaris 2.4 in one
> IPX (plutao), the machine is a nis client of one running SunOS 4.1.3 (poirot),
> from which it mounts the mail directory. Poirot also acts as a gateway between
> my local net and the rest of the world since it has two network interfaces.
>
> So far so good. But the mail does get sent with a wrong from adress:
>
> > From fausto%poirot2@poirot.ist.utl.pt Thu Jun 1 19:57:27 1995
> > Date: Thu, 1 Jun 1995 19:57:18 +0200
> > From: fausto%poirot2@poirot.ist.utl.pt (Fausto Almeida )
> > To: fausto@mercurio.uc.pt
> > Subject: teste
> > Content-Length: 14
> >
> > fdgfd
> > gdfgdgf
> >
>
> I'd like it to be sent with a from adress like: fausto@poirot.ist.utl.pt
> or to make poirot able to solve the above adresses. I tried to tweak sendmail.cf
> but without results (I'm using sendmail.cf to subsidiary machines).
>
> I would apreciate any sgestions.
> Thanks.
>
> --Fausto
>
>

Thanks again

--Fausto



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