[K12OSN] Sendmail configs using webmin on thick clients

[Steve Hampton]

Hi Group,

First I wanted to thank everyone that gave me some great feedback on
the vision I posted a few days ago. I needed both the negative and
positive if I plan to move forward with this dream, and I am going to
present my ideas at a school reform meeting that our staff is having
next Tuesday.

Secondly I have run into an issue I don't know how to overcome.  I
have configured Sendmail on my K12ltsp server.  I have both thin and
thick clients attached to it.  The sendmail works fine when the
students log into a thin client and send mail.  The issue came up when
I tried to send mail to a user on a thick client (which also has the
k12 package installed, and uses samba/Ldap for authentication).  The
first error I got was that no mailbox for the user existed in
/var/spool/mail   To solve this I exported  the contents of
/var/spool/mail/ using nfs and editing the /etc/exports file on the
server.  I then made  the appropriate entries in the /etc/fstab file
on the thick clients to have them mount the file from the server to
the thick client upon login.  This fixed half the problem.  I can now
sendmail to a user on a thick client from a thin client or the server
but I can't go the other way.  I can't get the sendmail servers
running on the thick clients  to forward the mail back to my K12
server for distribution.  I am sure there is something I need to cange
in the sendmail configs on the thick clients using webmin but I can't
figure it out.  I have tried going into thick clients sendmail options
under webmin and changing the following but it wasn't effective.  I
tried using both the ip address of the k12 server and the servers dns
name (server.ltsp) in the following options:
Send outgoing mail via host
Forward unqualified usernames to host
Forward mail for local users to host
But when I would restart sendmail and then try to send a message to a
system user it would fail.  If anyone know what configs I need to
change on the thick clients to get them to push the mail back to the
main server for distribution, please let me know.

Or if I am going about this all wrong and there is a much easier way
to have the students send messages to each other and myself on a
hybrid thin and thick client k12 lan I am all ears.  Thanks.

Warmly
Steven Hampton
Swain County High School
Technology Instructor

Open Source, The Right Thing To Do!