How do I change the configration of sendmail

Rick Stevens rstevens at vitalstream.com
Fri Jan 2 19:09:50 UTC 2004


Jeff Lasman wrote:
> On Friday 02 January 2004 07:19 am, William Hooper wrote:
> 
> 
>>[whooper at poit whooper]$ grep -n EDIT /etc/mail/sendmail.cf
>>25:#####        DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE!  Only edit the source .mc
>>file. [whooper at poit whooper]$
> 
> 
> Thank you.  So it says.  I've never had a problem, and I shouldn't since 
> upgrades are presumed to make a copy of all config files before 
> changing them.
> 
> I've always had a copy of the file every time I've ever made a change to 
> it, but I honestly don't ever remember having to use it.
> 
> Of course your mileage may vary.

The warning is there simply because the startup script in
/etc/rc.d/init.d does a "make all" in the /etc/mail directory and the
changes made to sendmail.cf may be overwritten.  This SHOULDN'T happen
if you edit sendmail.cf directly, since the target file (.cf) will be
newer than the source (.mc).  This is a RedHat/Fedora (and some other)
distribution "feature" and does NOT exist in a standard sendmail.org
distribution.

I agree that, unless you know what you're doing, you shouldn't futz with
.cf directly.  I've been a sendmail nerd for almost 20 years so the .cf
doesn't scare me and I generally need greater "tweakability" than the
.mc file will afford.  I rarely use m4 and don't recall the language
well enough to write my own macros for it, so I need to play with .cf to
do what I need.

YMMV, BNI, etc.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-      "Microsoft is a cross between The Borg and the Ferengi.       -
-  Unfortunately they use Borg to do their marketing and Ferengi to  -
-               do their programming."  -- Simon Slavin              -
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