Sendmail 8.12.6 Problem

[SLG]

I recently upgraded from SuSE 7.3 to SuSE 8.1 and in the process upgraded Sendmail from 8.11 to 8.12.6. Now I am unable to send mail initiated by the box. Mail is relaying through with no problems and it is routing outside mail delivered to it for local users, but when I try to send mail from the box itself I get the following:

mail -v user

user... Connecting to localhost.domain.com via relay...
user... Deferred: Connection refused by localhost.domain.com

I am not using DNS and would rather avoid setting it up since it is not needed on my small network.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[RhythmAce]

The earlier had some files in /etc/ and others in /etc/mail/. If you did an upgrade rather than a fresh install, make sure all the files are in the /etc/mail/ dir. You might also check /etc/mail/Local-Host-Names and make sure all the names of you local machines are in there. This includes your machine. If you have a machine name (sometimes called netbios name), that also needs to be in the list along with 172.0.0.1, 192.168.0.xx(internal ip), Localhost and localhost.localdomain. Is ome cases, you need to rebuild sendmail.cf because dpending on the directives you had in the older version, they no longer work. If you edit sendmail.mc, you will need to run m4 to compile the new sendmail.cf.

m4 /etc/mail/sendmail.mc > /etc/mail/sendmail.cf

 

[SLG]

Ok, I added all IPs and hostnames to my /etc/mail/local-host-names and rebuilt my sendmail.cf file. Restarted sendmail and I am still having the same problems. =(
I did notice that the new sendmail.cf file no longer includes DRmailer:relayhostname or DHmailer:relayhostname. I added them but it seems to ignore them.
Thanks in advance!

 

[RhythmAce]

When you login to the machine your server is on, what name shows up? This name must be in the /etc/hosts file. This is not a new thing though so I don't know why it would stop working after the upgrade unless that file got overwriten. I don't know of any upgrade that would do that though.

 

[billr1]

Another thing to check for is a submit.cf configuration file (typically in /etc/mail). Current versions of sendmail actually have two configuration files now, instead on one, and use a special program for local email submission. Older versions of sendmail used a single program (/usr/sbin/sendmail) for both submitting new email and gathering incoming mail. In current versions is was split in two for security reasons. I think this started around v8.10 or 8.11, but you could still configure sendmail and compile time as a single monolithic program.

So, it's possible your SuSE sendmail 8.11.x system was configured as a single program, while the 8.12.6 version was configured to use the two seperate programs. You can check out

http://www.sendmail.org

for details on the changes. (So in other words, it's possible you may be making all these changes to the wrong file, or may need to add them to submit.mc as well, and rebuild submit.cf from submit.mc.)

-Bill