Upgrading sendmail version 1

[beefstew]

Hi,

I am totally green on sendmail and trying to learn the ropes. I have a fresh install of Redhat 9 installed and have downloaded sendmail 8.13.4 which i am trying to run with no luck. I keep getting errors. Does anyone know of a good white paper or any tips to help me with my quest.

Cheers

 

[jkupski]

If you're using a redhat system, there's no reason not to use redhat's RPMs which, unless you've gone and done something bad to the system, will pretty much always work. Fedora LEgacy has an active support channel for RH9. You can find the appropriate sendmail RPMs at:

http://download.fedoralegacy.org/redhat/9/updates/i386/sendmail-8.12.8-9.90.i386.rpm

http://download.fedoralegacy.org/redhat/9/updates/i386/sendmail-cf-8.12.8-9.90.i386.rpm

http://download.fedoralegacy.org/redhat/9/updates/i386/sendmail-devel-8.12.8-9.90.i386.rpm

http://download.fedoralegacy.org/redhat/9/updates/i386/sendmail-doc-8.12.8-9.90.i386.rpm

You probably only need sendmail and sendmail-cf. Start there and see if you're still having issues.

 

[beefstew]

That's great,

Can you now tell me please, do I need to download it to a certain directory and run it from there?

And is it run with rpm -U sendmail???

As I said - I am green

Cheers

 

[jkupski]

You do not need to download RPMs to any specific location--/tmp will do, unless you want to retain them long term. Yes, 'rpm -U sendmail' should work fine, and repeat for sendmail-cf, and any of the other RPMs you want to install.

If you've installed yum and are pointing at the Fedora Legacy channel for RH9, you can simply do "yum upgrade sendmail" and not have to worry about downloading anything.

 

[beefstew]

OK done that and it is showing the new version. I,m getting a bit confused though as the documentaion I am reading shows the sendmail-cf file in /usr/local/src whereas mine is in /etc/mail

Could you please shed some light on this?

 

[jkupski]

If I'm not mistaken, you're talking about sendmail.mc, and not sendmail.cf, right?

This is personal preference--whoever wrote the documentation probably keeps their uncompiled config files in /usr/local/src. By default, Redhat installs the example file into /etc/mail.

Don't worry about it--sendmail.mc is a human readable version of sendmail's config file. Once you're happy with it, you'll use m4 to compile it into sendmail.cf. sendmail.mc is NOT used by the system directly.

 

[beefstew]

So am I right in thinking that I edit the sendmail.mc file directly and that in turn updates the sendmail.cf file?

If this is the way to do it, what is the command to use M4 to compile it into sendmail.cf? Does it have anyting to do with makemap hash?

Cheers

 

[jkupski]

makemap is for stuff like access.db.

As for compiling sendmail.cf, it's simple. For example:

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