sendmail update left me in a fix

[Parker Jones]

>>The 5th April sendmail update screwed up mail on my RH-7.3 box.
>
>How so?

Problem: Sending mail failed after the update.  I send locally using nmh. 
Restarting sendmail didn't help. Receiving appeared to be unaffected.

Quick fix: After waiting several days hoping the problem would just go away, 
I had to do something about it.  I appear to have made the problem go away 
by replacing sendmail.cf with its old version (prior to the sendmail update) 
and restarting sendmail.

Looking for an explanation:  I tried to reproduce the problem by restoring 
the sendmail.cf supplied with the update and restarting sendmail.  
Surprisingly I could still send - I expected it to break.  This would 
suggest that there is something else going on that I'm not taking into 
consideration (rebuilding of sendmail.mc perhaps?)

So I still have no satisfactory explanation of the cause of the problem.

If sendmail.mc is compiled will the problem reappear?

Is the sendmail.mc replaced during the update?  Should there be a backup of 
the old version e.g as sendmail.mc.rpmnew? I didn't find one.   Why is there 
a sendmail.cf.rpmnew and not a sendmail.mc.rpmnew?

It looks like the update caused the problem but not being able to reproduce 
it is frustrating.



>>In /var/log/maillog I'm getting lots of these:
>>Apr  7 01:28:17 stancomb sendmail[6702]: k36NSHhs006702: localhost
>>[127.0.0.1] did not issue MAIL/EXPN/VRFY/ETRN during connection to MTA
>
>That message doesn't mean much of anything by itself.  In fact, I see
>lots of these in normal operation.  Now, something is no doubt causing
>them, but we can't tell what without more information from you.

Well that's what maillog says.  Perhaps you could be more specific about 
what further information would be useful.

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