Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcvax!ukc!warwick!cudcv From: cudcv@warwick.ac.uk (Rob McMahon) Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail Subject: Re: How to prevent mail to non-existent accounts Message-ID: <165@titania.warwick.ac.uk> Date: 15 Jul 89 10:54:15 GMT References: <11680@cgl.ucsf.EDU> <3853@phri.UUCP> <844@helios.toronto.edu> Reply-To: cudcv@warwick.ac.uk (Rob McMahon) Organization: Computing Services, Warwick University, UK Lines: 45 In article <844@helios.toronto.edu> sysruth@helios.physics.utoronto.ca (Ruth Milner) writes: >In article <3853@phri.UUCP> roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) writes: >>Why not just share /usr/lib/aliases files as well? Have each person have an >>alias pointing to the machine where their home directory is. > >Yuck! And then every time you add a new user you have to append an alias >onto /usr/lib/aliases and tell every system on which they have no home >directory to run newaliases. Not to mention removing the alias when you >remove the user ... > >Personally, I'd rather hack sendmail once every 6 months when I make a >new version. > >Of course, if you add an account about once a month or less, it's no big >deal. When you are adding as many as several accounts per week, as we do, >it is not nice at all. We are constantly adding and deleting accounts, sometimes say 250 in a block, always 10s and sometimes (like at the start of a term) 100s in a week. We just run a script every night that snarfs the information from the password databases, knocks up an alias file, and rdist's it around all the machines. It adds automatically generated personal aliases too (you can mail me at ...). There are currently 13395 aliases in our alias database, and it requires virtually no manual intervention (only to say add a new mailing list). Alternatively you could add a couple of lines to your makeuser/deluser programs to change the alias file. >... when we add a new *system* we make one change each to two files, and >forever after all mail for those systems is received centrally... Our diskless machines share alias files as well as /usr/spool/mail with the server. Adding a new diskless machine requires precisely zero changes. Adding a new server requires one change to the makefile that distributes the alias files. >To each his/her own, I guess. Of course, but I think there are easier/cleaner alternatives than you've chosen. Rob -- UUCP: ...!mcvax!ukc!warwick!cudcv PHONE: +44 203 523037 JANET: cudcv@uk.ac.warwick ARPA: cudcv@warwick.ac.uk Rob McMahon, Computing Services, Warwick University, Coventry CV4 7AL, England