Sendmail Config 1

[dalfon]

I'm in a University IT dept.. We house a sendmail server for our domain.. now want to shift students to another mail system while leaving faculty & staff on in house server and I've modified the MX records in our DNS as the mail provider instructed.. Problem is that while mail addressed to the student from outside works fine.. mail on campus still goes to the original Mail server..Is there a way to configure Sendmail to route mail to another mail server without setting up a sub domain? I've been told there isn't and instead of student@univ.edu we would have to have student@alt.univ.edu to have the routing work properly.. If that's the only way to make it work so be it but I thought I'd check here for tips first.. hopefully, this makes sense..

Thanks for any responses
Don

 

[stfaprc]

Would virtuser help? I can't quite tell if you need to setup a MASQUERADE configuration.

 

[dalfon]

What is virtuser and masquerade...I may be able to tell if it would help?

Thanks,
Don

 

[RhythmAce]

I don't think MASQUERADEing is the way to go here. Basically what it does is has all the mail from a particular server have the same "From" domain. Using vortusertable would work but it would not be practicle in a university setting because it involves creating an entry for each and every user on the system. I hate to say it but the sub-domain idea seems to be the best way. The drawback there is that one group, students or faculty will have to change their email addresses. Sendmail uses the system username/password for email accounts. It may be that the new server has its own database for users. In that case it would be a lot easier to approach the issue from that end. I am assuming that the old sendmail server was a stand-alone configuration and not a front end to ExchangeServer or something.

 

[dalfon]

You are correct it's a stand alone sendmail sun box I inherited from the previous admin.. the new mail server would be outsourced (google)..

Question if sendmail uses accts. on the local server, if the account was not there would it use MX records to forward the message or just say no account present? If so that may work.. I hadn't removed the accts for the test group as google swore that routing mail through them would act as a gateway just by changing the MX record to point to their servers it works but only outside of campus not within the campus..Trying to not change the email addresses but not sure it can be done..

Thank you for your response and any help.
Don

 

[RhythmAce]

I'd have to know a little more to be able to answer about mail not going out through the new server. My guess would be that the mail clients are all pointing to the old mail servers. If the name of the mail server has changed then the old one is still being pointed to by the clients. A mail server has two dns records. An "A" record or Address record. This is just like the domain's "A" record. It points a name to an ip address. Let's say the name of the mail server is mail.domain.com and it points to the ip address 192.168.1.10. I know that's a private ip address but I'm pretending. ;-) Next you have the "MX" record or Mail eXchange record. This record basically says that mail.domain.com handles the mail for domain.com. When you modified the "MX" record, did you use a new name for the mail server? If the old server name is now pointing to googles servers, then the problem is more than likely that the university has its own dns server or for some reason the old address is being cached.