Re: sendmail blues

[Yuri Csapo <ycsapo@exchange.mines.edu>]

Glynn,

Thank you for the thorough answer - reminded me of "the good old days."

Glynn Clements wrote:
> Sendmail only uses submit.cf if it exists, otherwise it uses
> sendmail.cf. Also, you can force a particular configuration with the
> -Ac and -Am switches.

I was not aware of this. I'll do some tests Monday.

> FWIW, the rationale behind having a separate MSP is to eliminate the
> need for sendmail to be setuid-root; instead, the sendmail binary is
> setgid to the "smmsp" group.

I understand the rationale. And I suppose it makes sense these days when 
a lot of people running Linux are desktop users who have no idea and no 
desire to learn better. Sendmail was hit hard in the early days of the 
Eternal September because of this, so they had to do something. OTOH I 
always thought it very silly how everybody runs away from the root user, 
designing mechanisms to prevent its use (i.e. root can't log on to a 
default install of Ubuntu). It ends up turning sudo into Linux's version 
of Microsoft's OK button - people use without reading, understanding or 
caring, compounding the problem. Of course you shouldn't be root for 
your day-to-day tasks but there's nothing wrong with using root when 
that's required. It's a matter of common sense and best practices. Sorry 
for the rant, you just happened to push one of my buttons... <sm>

> 
> BTW, Local delivery shouldn't require that anything is listening on
> port 25. However, you may have to tell sendmail what constitutes
> "local"; it's possible that sendmail is treating "localhost" as a
> normal (remote) domain rather than a local one.
> 

Local delivery is not what I'm looking for. I want this box to forward 
along to our smart host.

Thanks

Yuri