Request for assistance

[jabr at abreau.net (John Abreau)]

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ron.peterson at yellowbank.com writes:

> On Tue, Dec 17, 2002 at 11:19:08PM -0500, Derek Martin wrote:
[snip]
> > You can also have a daemon listening, but only accepting connections
> > from localhost.
> 
> Cw localhost, you mean?  Or is there a way to tell sendmail to only
> listen on 127.0.0.1?

No, that simply tells sendmail that addresses of the form "user at localhost" 
are to be accepted for local delivery. The option to only listen on 
localhost is the following:

    O DaemonPortOptions=Port=smtp,Addr=127.0.0.1, Name=MTA

> On that note, I'm still wonding how to get debian stable to run in cron
> mode - i.e. not run as a daemon.  The 'proper' way to do this, as far as
> I can figure, is to edit this section in /etc/mail/sendmail.conf:
[snip]
> After editing this file, then run /usr/share/sendmail/update_sendmail.
> 
> However, if I do this, jobs start to pile up in
> /var/spool/mqueue-client, and never get sent.

That option tells sendmail that the sysadmin has taken responsibility 
to set up an external mechanism to run the queue, and doesn't want 
sendmail second-guessing when to run it. This is useful, for example, 
in store-and-forward mail networks where the cost of a dial-up connection 
(particularly on business-rate phone lines) may be cheaper after-hours. 
Cron is merely the obvious tool for triggering this external mechanism 
on a defined schedule.

While I can't check it sepcifically, as that file doesn't seem to 
exist on a RedHat 8.0 system, I wouldn't expect that "update_sendmail" 
would muck around with cron; that would be very error-prone, not to  
mention it would defeat the whole point of the sysadmin wanting fine 
control over scheduling the queue runs.

If you're going to use cron for this, you'll have to add your own 
crontab entries by hand to invoke "sendmail -q" at the times you want 
it to run. 


- --
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
Email jabr at blu.org / WWW http://www.abreau.net / PGP-Key-ID 0xD5C7B5D9
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