sendmail update left me in a fix

[David Eisenstein]

Parker Jones wrote:
>>> The 5th April sendmail update screwed up mail on my RH-7.3 box.
> 
> 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.

Hi Parker,

Can you send a copy of your old /etc/sendmail.cf (that worked) and the new one
(that didn't work, initially)?  And a copy of your old /etc/mail/sendmail.mc
and a copy of the new one (if there are two or more versions)?

You said, "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."
Prior to which sendmail update, do you know?

> 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?)

I would have expected it to break too, since it was your replacing the new
sendmail.cf with the old one (and restarting sendmail?) that seemed to fix the
problem for you initially.

> So I still have no satisfactory explanation of the cause of the problem.
> 
> If sendmail.mc is compiled will the problem reappear?

Don't know.  You can try it.  Depends on the contents of sendmail.mc.  Did you
make any changes to either sendmail.mc or sendmail.cf on your system before
the updates started coming out at all?  (That is, when sendmail was still
running as sendmail-8.11.6, before March 24th?)

> Is the sendmail.mc replaced during the update?

It can be, but should not be if you made any customizations to it.  In the
case of sendmail.mc, when the RPM upgrade process finds /etc/mail/sendmail.mc
in the new rpm binary package that might replace one currently on your system,
 it first checks the one already installed to see if any (manual) changes have
been made to it since it was initially installed.  If manual changes were made
(say, by you going in and tweaking it), then the upgrade process installs the
new packaged file as "sendmail.mc.rpmnew" and leaves the already-installed one
alone.  If no changes were made, it replaces it with the new one.

It does the same checks for /etc/sendmail.cf as well.  It would have only
replaced /etc/sendmail.cf if you had never touched it.  At least, that's how
it is *supposed* to work.

> 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?

Okay.  It sounds like sendmail.mc was never changed since the install of the
old sendmail-8.11.6.  However, it sounds like sendmail.cf *was* fiddled with,
somewhere, somehow...  You can help us verify that by sharing what
sendmail.cf.* files you have.

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

I know how you feel.  It always seems that your car acts up until you take it
to the mechanic's shop.  When you do, it always runs perfectly.  As soon as
it's out of sight of the mechanic, it acts up again.  ;-)

Hope this helped.  Please do send the config files.  Maybe there is something
that was overlooked.

	Warm regards,
	David
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