Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!DELRIO.CC.UMICH.EDU!paul From: paul@DELRIO.CC.UMICH.EDU ('da Kingfish) Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo Subject: Re: sendmail problem Message-ID: <8808192141.AA03436@delrio.cc.umich.edu> Date: 19 Aug 88 21:41:42 GMT References: <8808162127.AA08397@cod.nosc.mil> Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 61 unknown mailer error #N problems are when /bin/mail can't open /usr/spool/mail/luser. N is the # of mailboxes it couldn't open. The smtp error 550/no such user is when /etc/passwd and/or /usr/lib/aliases are not available to sendmail when it is running sendmail -bd and doing smtp or delivering from the queue. I am just finishing a set of mail related changes for Apollos. They include: /bin/mail only tries one person per invocation. if it fails, it exits with EX_TEMPFAIL. Even "local" delivery can be a remote delivery with a distributed file system. /bin/mail is now "never fails" instead of "always works". mh's inc, /bin/mail, and /usr/ucb/Mail all use the same locking style. Any other program that modifies /usr/spool/mail/box uses the same style by using ios_$ versions of open, fopen, and flock that I wrote. (By saying -lopen at compile time.) Error texts are more explanatory. They are "well-behaved". sendmail will 451 instead of 550 when aliases/passwd are not available. It uses "new" dbm instead of dbm and the new dbm uses the locking routines described above, so it doesn't matter where the process is running relative to where the alias/passwd files are. You can run sendmail -bi (newaliases) from any node. mailq prints out the apollo error text as well as the perror text for failed messages still in the queue. /bin/mail failures are logged so you can stcode the result. uids are used for message ids. syslog uses no AF_UNIX at all, for various reasons, and I use the 4.3 style syslog routines. These compile and run under 9.7 and 10. For SR10, I delete the distributed /usr/new and put in my own. Many of these changes are generally useful, and not just for Apollos. After a month of testing with real people's mail in September (I run these changes on a small ring with only staff usage now) I'll do my best to make all this available, via whatever means seem practicable and doable. I've been running this code for a while, and am polishing it up, checking #ifdefs and Makefiles now, etc. to make it releasable. The base versions for this are bind 4.8, sendmail 5.59, mh 6.5, and the 4.3 bsd vax release. I have been collaborating with Mark Giuffrida from the engineering college here, where several 100 Apollos are running. Kind folks from Apollo have given me the right pieces of information and helped track down problems. We've started on an NCS-based version of a lot of this too. Take it from me: file systems bad; objects, managers, and servers good. --paul