[17733] in Athena Bugs
Re: linux 8.3.30: sendmail
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathon Weiss)
Wed Apr 5 16:54:59 2000
Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2000 16:54:52 -0400
Message-Id: <200004052054.QAA19533@vorpal-blade.mit.edu>
To: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@mit.edu>
CC: bugs@mit.edu
In-reply-to: "[17732] in Athena Bugs"
From: Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@MIT.EDU>
> Mail sent to beland@press-your-luck.mit.edu gets deposited locally in
> /var/spool/mail, by default. Mail sent to
> root@press-your-luck.mit.edu gets piped to /dev/null.
Actually, mail to beland@press-your-luck.mit.edu only gets delivered
locally because beland is in the passwd file. If that were not the
case, it would get bounced with an "unknown user" error.
> The desired behavior (and the behavior under RHA 5.2) is for mail sent
> to user@some-host.mit.edu to be bounced to user@mit.edu, unless the
> address is defines as deliverable locally, as for root.
The problem here is that the sendmail configuration in the IS RedHat
6.1 Linux port is based on the sendmail configuration being used by
other IS supported Athena platforms (ie., Solaris and IRIX), not on
the configurations being used in the SIPB supported RedHat 5.2 linux
port. The behavior you note on press-your-luck is consistant with
other Athena 8.3 platforms. I'm afraid we don't consider this a bug.
That said, it is fairly easy to work around the problem:
> I usually configure /etc/aliases to bounce root to me at
> beland@mit.edu, so errors and letters sent there get read. I think
Just edit the alias for root in the aliases file to forward the mail
to beland@mit.edu rather than dumping it to /dev/null. Similarly,
creating an alias for beland@localhost pointing to beland@mit.edu
should cause mail for beland@press-your-luck.mit.edu to be forwarded
to beland@mit.edu.
> the default behavior for root on private machines should be to spool
> it locally, so it can be accessed when the owner logs in as root.
The main reason that it isn't practical to make local spooling of
root's mail the default is that invariably cron or somethign would end
up sending a lot of mail to root on a machien where no one looks at
root's mail and it would eventually fill the disk.
> This may be related to the bug listed on http://web.mit.edu/als/www/:
> - /etc/athena/sendmail.conf is missing
Actually, this is unrelated and has to do with what mailhub the IS
Linux Athena machiens use to forward mail, but thanks for pointing out
since it would have been useful to know if it had been related.
--
Jonathon
