need help on sendmail

[sonun]

I am treading into this excrutiatingly painful world of sendmail. I reviwed some books (Eric Allman et. al., not fully though!!) not and some links but am still not confident to deal with sendmail yet. There are so many gaps, nooks and cranies that I feel completely lost.
Could any of you good people out there know of any "sendmail for dummies" or "teach yourself sendmail in 24 hours" like tutorials.
Would be most greateful as it would help my bird-brains no end.
Thanks.

 

[JorGeVaL]

The are many books and docs regarding the "nightmare" of Sendmail.

The book SendMail from Oreilly (

http://www.oreilly.com

)is a good one, you may also want to take a look at

http://www.sendmail.org

That is all i can say and i hope you can have fun with sendmail...let me know if you do so ...

 

[meekrob]

I went through this same thing not too long ago. I read a tremendous book and spent countless hours tinkering with sendmail. Then I got rooted.

Eventually I switched to qmail:

http://www.qmail.org/

I got it up and running in three hours. The configuration is logical and sane. Best of all it was designed with security in mind.

I can't say for certain that sendmail is still insecure. What I can say is that I highly suggest qmail over sendmail. It is probably just as powerful and I am very confident in it's application level security.

Good luck!

 

[ifincham]

Hi,

The other one is postfix (

http://www.postfix.org/)

which, like qmail, is somewhat simpler to administer than sendmail.

Did you see the redhat howto/faq on sendmail ?

http://www.redhat.com/support/docs/howto/RH-sendmail-HOWTO/book1.html

http://www.redhat.com/support/docs/faqs/RH-sendmail-FAQ/book1.html

Hope this helps

 

[sonun]

wow thanks that was a lot of help.
I will tinker around a for some time and see.
Thanks.

 

[sonun]

I am sorry, just one mre thing. Should I be installing sendmail at all on my system as when I,
$rpm -q sendmail, I get,
sendmail-8.11.2-14
So, I need not install it again then. I didnt know redhat installs sendmail by default.
Thanks.

 

[ifincham]

Hi,

It all depends what kind of install you do. If you do a server class it probably does install sendmail automatically - maybe even for all installs as you can use it as a personal smtp server if you wish.

There is a newer rpm which you should get as it patches a root exploit -->

http://www.redhat.com/support/errata/RHSA-2001-106.html

Regards

 

[sonun]

Just another query. What is the opinion on,

http://cork.linux.ie/projects/install-sendmail/

"edit:
Author: Donncha O Caoimh.
This Perl script will configure sendmail and fetchmail on your machine.
With it, you can setup a simple network mail server, or even multi-user mail on your own home PC running Linux/Unix.
All you need to know is what your email address is, some login names and passwords, mail server addresses and optionally, the IP addresses of your network.
Just run the script, no need to be root until right at the end when you're asked to enter the root password to move various files to their system locations.
This version has been extensively tested on Sendmail 8.9.x but not on the newer Sendmail 8.10.x series. Please submit bug reports if you encounter any trouble.
Original homepage:

http://members.xoom.com/xeer/index.html"

It says it works on 8.9/8.10. Does that mean higher as well. One thing is that there has been no updates after Jan 2001 if that is any concern.
I was going to try my best in sendmail over the weekend and then look into other options kinldy suggested by others.

Thanks.

 

[ifincham]

Hi,



I had a very quick look at that script and it doesn't look incredibly sophisticated but you can always give it a go. It all depends what you want really.



Have you tried using webmin ? That has html based gui admin interfaces to most things in linux including sendmail. Its maintained by Caldera but works on all linux systems as far as I'm aware -->

http://www.webmin.com/webmin

Regards

 

[haneo]

try this link i had just found:

http://www.redhat.com/support/resources/mail_news/mail.html

You will find the HOW-TO and the FAQ of sandmail .

I had just downloaded it to my floppy with HTTrack (thanks ifincham for your help ;-) )

 

[sonun]

meekrob,
When I try installing qmail, I get,
#rpm -Uvh rpm-3.0.5-9.5x.i386.rpm
error: failed dependencies:
rpm <= 4.0-0.65 conflicts with glibc-2.2.2-10
rpm = 4.0.2 is needed by rpm-python-4.0.2-8
rpm = 4.0.2 is needed by rpm-build-4.0.2-8
rpm = 4.0.2 is needed by rpm-devel-4.0.2-8
librpmio.so.0 is needed by rpm-python-4.0.2-8
librpmio.so.0 is needed by gnorpm-0.96-1
librpmio.so.0 is needed by kdeadmin-2.1.1-3
librpmio.so.0 is needed by rpm-build-4.0.2-8

I have 2.4.6 kernel on redhat7.1.
What am I missing.

Since I was at the liberty, I thought I might as well benchmark efforts whilst configuring sendmail/qmail/postfix.

Thanks.

 

[ifincham]

Hi,

You don't want to do that... Although you are referring to qmail, what you are actually showing is trying to install an earlier version of rpm itself (the redhat package manager). With each major version of rpm the database format changed such that you cannot readily downgrade even if you want to. I can see that they are at -->

http://www.qmail.org/rpms/

but that is very misleading. They date from a time when rpm was on version 2 and the stuff qmail had built needed version 3. However, you are already on version 4. As it says, for the binaries themselves you start in /var-qmail/ .

Qmail rpms have always been a problem due to the licence with which qmail is distributed. Unless things have changed very recently, you will not find redhat or anyone else providing pre-built rpms for this reason. In fact, it looks as if the 'rpms' provided on that site are srpms (source code rpms) which you have to compile yourself. See -->

http://www.qmail.org/rpms/var-qmail/INSTRUCTIONS.var-qmail

Regards

 

[meekrob]

Sosun,

There is no easy way around it, you will need to at least read the document &quot;Life with qmail&quot; (found on the qmail site) to get qmail installed. Still, even though there are no easy rpm based installs I think you will find this benificial in the end. Your reward will be that you will possess a basic knowledge of qmail by the time you get started. Compiling your own programs is a basic linux system administration task, and not as scary or difficult as it may sound. Just read the doc, and follow the instructions and you should probably be able to get things working in an afternoon.