mail confusion

[Les Mikesell]

On Tue, 2005-11-08 at 23:36, Jay Moore wrote:
> > > Bottom Line: Having found this trove of knowledge, I *think* my best
> > > course of action is to fix (right after I find it) the sendmail startup
> > > to remove the "-bd" option, 
> > 
> > Fine.  Just don't bother others with complaints when mail within your
> > own system (e.g., mail from cron jobs, mail from logwatch, etc.)
> > just sits in /var/spool/clientmqueue and is never delivered. 
> 
> !?! Are you saying that running sendmail without "-bd" will cause this?

Probably - anything that submits mail to the localhost via smtp
will fail, and if you also take out the -q, or eliminat that process
deliveries won't happen  either. 

> According to the "sendmail Cookbook", "-bd" should not be used except
> for mail servers. Ref Chap. 10, "Securing sendmail". 

They don't understand the setup where sendmail only listens on
the localhost address.

> > FWIW, sendmail is a service started by 'init' in run levels 2-5.  The
> > files and links controlling that are in /etc/rc.d/init.d and
> > /etc/rc.d/rc?.d .  Unless you've changed the default setup, sendmail
> > accept connections only from 127.0.0.1 .
> 
> As I stated previously, I have *not* changed my default setup for
> running sendmail. And pardon my bitching, but why the f**k do I have to
> hack a shell script to change the startup behavior? IMHO, this is BFU.

What?  There is nothing easier than editing a text file.  If you
aren't able to do that, how do you manage to type all these messages?
Almost every command you do on unix/linux systems is parsed by the
shell before starting.  Learning how the shell works can pay off
every time you use it.

> Here's what I find in /etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail... how would you suggest
> I change this?

I'd suggest you leave it alone until you understand how to make it
better.  It works well enough as-is.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com