Re: How to SMTP (Email) Server Fedora 6?

Les Mikesell wrote:
Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:


Not what I said at all. But no configuration is going to be "right"
for people with commercial accounts.

I suppose there are people who don't want user@server to go to that
user's mailbox. There are also probably people who want their ssh login
to do something other than log in as the specified user - but I'm not
sure why either of those would be the case.

Could be, but what has that to do with this discussion? On the other
hand, I can see when you might want the local mail server to send
all mail to a central mail server, and all users on the network to
get their mail from that server. This is a fairly common setup.

The stock
configuration will work for stand-alone machines, and is fairly safe
to run on a network machine.

Work? How can something that doesn't accept mail work?

But it does accept mail. Granted, it only accepts mail generated on
the local machine, or using another program to transport them to the
local machine. But this works for a lot of users. Just because it
does not work for you and I, does not mean it does not work.

To fully integrate the mail server into the network, you are going
to have to do some network specific modifications in just about
every case. The days when a mail server could send mail to any other
mail server without specific configuration are gone. If you are a
non-commercial user, chances are you have to relay though your ISP's
mail server. You may have to do the same with a small commercial
network. With just about any network, you have to set up who can
send mail through the server. You may also need to change how your
mail server announces itself over the Internet. You may also need to
route all outgoing mail through one server, and you may need to
route internal mail to another server.

Yes, it is reasonable to expect a machine to be a mail hub, a mail
relay, or a mail client. So 3 working copies of sendmail.mc would be a
good start instead of one broken one, along with some documentation for
those specific common tweaks you mention.

I don't think that 3 examples of sendmail.mc would be enough. But
maybe it is that I have been away from configuring Sendmail for a
few years. Maybe you could provide examples for this? I remember
that there used to be several example configuration files in the
Sendmail configuration package, but I have not looked lately. I tend
to run Postfix as a mail server now days.

It is also reasonable for a machine to only need to deliver locally
generated mail. My laptop is a perfect example of this. The mail
server on it is only there to handle messages generated on the
machine. It never needs to accept messages from the outside world,
and it also doesn't need to send then. It just needs to do local
delivery. So the "broken" configuration works fine. I use
Thunderbird to handle all mail to/from the Internet. It is
configured so that I can use it from different networks.

What about the people that have their primary mail server at their
hosting service? Are they relaying their outgoing mail through the
same server? If so, you have to change the configuration to use that
host as a relay. If you are not relaying through the hosting server,
do you have to relay through your ISP's mail server? Or does the
server have to masquerade as another host when sending mail over the
Internet?

Those things wouldn't have to be any harder than, say, configuring
authentication against a windows domain controller which is a
fill-in-the-form option in the RH tools.

I am sure it could be done - after all, webmin has a Sendmail
module. It isn't something I would use. I leave it to the people
that would use it to push for a design that does what they want.
Chances are, I will still edit the files myself, instead of using
the GUI. The fact that I have that choice is one of the great things
about Linux.

The big thing we disagree on is that you say the configuration is
broken because it doesn't default to the way you think it should,
and I do not think it is broken because it does the job for a stand
alone system that is not a domain mail server. Yes, some
configurations require that Sendmail be able to receive mail from
the Internet, or the local network, but there are plenty of other
configurations that do not require this.

I like the fact that it is locked down by default. Then again, I can
remember when most mail servers were open relays. You could spoof a
message by telnetting to port 25 on the mail server you wanted the
message to come from, and feeding it your message. The server would
then happily relay the message to the destination, and it would have
all the correct headers...

Mikkel
--

Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!

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