sendmail on freeBSD

[weedom]

I decided to branch out and try a different flavour of Linux, and plumped for BSD. Everything is OK except I can't get sendmail running... again.

I've done everything recommended in this thread:

http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=995125

but I still get connection refused when I try to access my server from my home PC.

Again, I've got a simple perl script which I can run to listen on port 25. So I stop sendmail, get this little script to run, and I connect fine. So, again, it's not a firewall issue.

With the freeBSD sendmail installation came a whole load of .cf files which I don't think I need/want. So I've tarred them up safely, then removed them. All that is in /etc/mail now, cf-wise, is sendmail.cf and submit.cf.

"netstat -an | grep 25" gives the following:

netstat -an | grep 25
tcp4 0 0 127.0.0.1.25 *.* LISTEN

As well as following the advice given in the previous thread, I've added a line to sendmail.cf and submit.cf in SRelay_ok which says this:

R192.168.1.2 $@ RELAY originated locally

 

[tchatzi]

try [red]ipfw list[/red] maybe your firewall is blocking the port

if it doesn't work then you have to recompile the kernel with the firewall options


``The wise man doesn't give the right answers,
he poses the right questions.''
TIMTOWTDI

 

[mrballcb]

The netstat says exactly what the problem is. It's only listening on 127.0.0.1 instead of 0.0.0.0 (all interfaces). Change your sendmail.mc from:
DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Port=smtp,Addr=127.0.0.1, Name=MTA')dnl
to
DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Port=smtp,Addr=0.0.0.0, Name=MTA')dnl
or
DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Port=smtp, Name=MTA')dnl

Then rebuild your sendmail.c4 with:
m4 < sendmail.mc > sendmail.cf

Then tell sendmail to reread the config file:
killall -HUP sendmail

Run your netstat command again and it should be listening to 0.0.0.0 instead of 127.0.0.1.

I think BSD's include a Makefile in /etc/mail so that you can simply do:
make sendmail.cf
make restart
and it will do the last 2 steps for you.