Xref: utzoo comp.mail.sendmail:2319 comp.mail.misc:4238 Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!ria!rrivax.rri.uwo.ca!lrb From: lrb@rrivax.rri.uwo.ca (Lance R. Bailey) Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail,comp.mail.misc Subject: Re: Mail architecture Message-ID: <1274@ria.ccs.uwo.ca> Date: 30 Oct 90 06:13:16 GMT References: <1990Oct29.170344.27870@kodak.kodak.com> Sender: news@ria.ccs.uwo.ca Reply-To: lrb@rrivax.rri.uwo.ca Followup-To: comp.mail.sendmail Distribution: na Organization: Robarts Research Institute -- London Canada Earth Lines: 100 News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.3-4 In article <1990Oct29.170344.27870@kodak.kodak.com>, mccrave@kodak.kodak.com (Donna McCrave) writes... >Here is your chance to wax philosophic on the net. I have the >task of "making the email in our division work." The rest is >up to me. My group has about 400 Sun systems spread out over >three plants. There are some other miscellaneous systems, but >the main concern is smtp mail. There is a mix of stand alone >systems, data-less clients, disk-less clients, and large file >servers. Most systems use NIS. We will also be providing >Internet mail, and have our own subdomain. > The Robarts is an institute with cleanly divisible research groups. we do not have '400 suns' scattered about, but we have enough standalone, diskless, dataless &c suns, together with vaxen, hp's, S.G. to make coordinating the whole mess a pain for the systems manager. me. to this is added the fact that some people want 'all mail to look like it came from one machine', some want department-wide aliasing, some want host specific aliasing &c. my slice of the domain for which i am respsonible is rri.uwo.ca and in the following i will uppercase it to avoid confusion. there are 6 departments or research areas within the robarts clinical pharmacology (clinpharm) heart and circulation (heart) stroke and aging (stroke) clinical trials (ctrg) imaging (irus AND mri) immunology (immune) (the seventh, admininstration, has yet to be convinced of the wisdom of email) all hosts are named as host.dept.RRI.UWO.CA (eg: sun.irus.RRI.UWO.CA, valve.heart.RRI.UWO.CA, rri9000.ctrg.RRI.UWO.CA) the only exception being the institute vax (rrivax.RRI.UWO.CA). there is ONE place of reject/accept for addresses of the format badhost.dept.RRI.UWO.CA. in the real-nice-world this would be nameservers and MX hosts, but we do not live there, we live in the real-world and thus i have at least one sendmail.cf foeey.dept.RRI.UWO.CA. my metric for deciding whethor or not a host is hidden under another is the password files. If a diskless sun has no password file of it's own or a disked sun uses YP to live off a servers password file then that host is hidden under the sun with the passwd file. mail directly to that machine name will bounce. if a server host is hiding many hosts and itself under one name then that host may or maynot receive mail directly. my personal feeling is not, but then again, i chose coke. what i have done is quite easy to manage once set up. it involve 3 template sendmail cf's which are tailored to meet the smtp"functions" of the host. 1) client.cf this is for a diskless node, a machine with the passwd files served by another machine. no MX records point to this machine and no daemon runs on it, the MX records point the the 'machine of dept authority'. 2) server-host.cf this is for either a host that serves a number of diskless/passwd-less machines -OR- a host that handles it's own mail. additionally, this host may have been designated the 'end point' of a department. that is all goodname.dept.RRI.UWO.CA may be shipped here if they land at the server for the entire domain, this allows a department to quickly have a host handled by mentioning it a class on this .cf until DNS data gets propagated/dumb-.cf updated. 3) domain.cf this .cf is the 'buck stops here' for *...*.RRI.UWO.CA. In the *real*nice*world, the only names that this would see is user@RRI.UWO.CA user@hostname.dept.RRI.UWO.CA and user@dept.RRI.UWO.CA because all else will be MX'ed to another host or 'dept host' but in the *real*world someone has to handle foo.bar.RRI.UWO.CA. this .cf is that place. any host.known-dept.RRI.UWO.CA is punted to the .cf for that known-dept. any host.unknown-dept.RRI.UWO.CA is kicked back with an unknown host/deptartment error. these three .cf's are able to handle what i think are the seven possible department needs. 1) a department name (eg: irus.RRI.UWO.CA) will hide ALL hosts in the dept 2) a department name hides MOST hosts 3) a department has one host and does not want to hide it under dept.RRI.UWO.CA 4) a department has one host and hides it under dept.RRI.UWO.CA 5) a department has many hosts and hides none under dept.RRI.UWO.CA 6) a department has NO hosts and wants an email link under dept.RRI.UWO.CA 7) a department has NO hosts and does not want an email link a lot of the above attitudes were created after much dissertation among the researchers in the institute and the input from my two smtp mentors, reggers and magi. Lance R. Bailey, Systems Manager ================================ box: Robarts Research Institute email: lrb@rri.uwo.ca Clinical Trials Resources Group fax: 519.663.3789 P.O. Box 5015, 100 Perth Dr. vox: 519.663.3787 ext. 4108 London, Canada N6A 5K8