[Techtalk] sendmail config questions

Rudy L. Zijlstra rudy at edsons.demon.nl
Sat Aug 9 10:09:04 EST 2003


Dennis Wheeler wrote:

>Hello ladies (and gentlemen),
>
>I haven't been following this list for a while, but now I'm starting a new
>job and may have bitten off more than I can chew. I'm an idiot and don't
>know enough about configuring and verifying sendmail, yet. I would
>appreciate someone pointing me in the right direction.
>
>I've got a remote server running RH 7.1 and sendmail 8.9 (I think)
>
Hmmm, upgrade to the latest version (8.12.9 last i looked), it has 
several security fixes. As far as i know 7.1 is *old* and i have no clue 
whether RH is still bringing out patches for it. You may have to install 
from source. I have to admit i do not track RH (do not use them).

>I suspect it might be an open relay, so I need to 1) turn that off if
>it is and 2) verfiy that's it's not afterwards.
>
This is default off on the later releases. You have to explicitly enable 
it to get an open relay with those

>It is accepting messages now, but they are just being queued and not
>delivered. They are running an exchange server that their clients are
>accessing via pop (again, I'm not sure here), but I don't see where the
>mail is being forwarded from the linux server to the nt server.
>
Does it have a direct connection to the internet, or should it forward 
mail to the exchange server?

>And their internal domain name is different from their external domain
>name. I tried sending a test message and eventually got an warning
>response "Could not send for 4 hours", with a name sever timeout error, so
>I'm suspecting this domain name difference may be the problem. They're
>
Not likely. Most probably a nameserver misconfiguration on the redhat 
install. When sendmail has no dependable DNS access, it cannot deliver mail.

>running an internal DNS on the same nt server as their exchange server, so
>I don't quite know how to query and/or modify it remotely
>
>I'm currently reading RedHat's sendmail howto and lots of stuff on
>sendmail.org. But there's so much, I'm getting lost.
>
>I'd appreciate some suggestions.
>
>Thanks,
>Dennis
>  
>
You likely need to tell sendmail to accept mail from both domain names. 
I cannot tell more without knowing more about the setup.

Cheers,

Rudy




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