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From: pbickers@groucho
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mips
Subject: Re: MIPS mail setup
Keywords: 4.51, sendmail, sendmail.nonamed
Message-ID: <1990Dec05.221615.5619@groucho>
Date: 5 Dec 90 22:16:15 GMT
References: <12376@milton.u.washington.edu>
Sender: pbickers@neon.chem.uidaho.edu
Reply-To: pbickers@tamaluit.phys.uidaho.edu (Paul Bickerstaff)
Organization: University of Idaho, Moscow
Lines: 47

In article <12376@milton.u.washington.edu> hg1915@milton.u.washington.edu (Helen Gottschalk) writes:
>
>  If this question has been talked on the net, please e-mail to me.
>
>  We have several MIPSs running MIPSOS 4.51 and couples Interactives UNIX
>system.  I have problem to send mail out from MIPS but no problem in 
>receiving it.  We don't run name server.  If I directly talk using SMTP 
>and it works fine.
>  I use the tcpproto.cf in /usr/lib/cf/cf to build my sendmail.cf.  I tried
>both sendmail and sendmail.nonamed.  Both parsing address ok and report
>successful sending in the syslog.  But no mail is received on the other end.
>no return mail either.

I had similar problems getting sendmail to work though I'm running a caching
nameserver (easy to set up) but here's what worked for me.

The answer is from the 4.50 and 4.51 installation note BTW but this seems to
be a common problem so...

1st:
touch /usr/lib/sendmail.ok

This creates an empty file whose existence tells the machine to use sendmail
when sending mail.

2nd:
create a file called /etc/vis.conf with the single line as described on pp9 and
10 of the 4.51 release notes according to whether you're using named, nonamed
or nis and make sure your etc/hosts and /etc/resolv.conf are appropriate.

In my case I used
host: dns files
for a nameserver with dns before files, contrary to the release notes (not
actually sure if I need files at all), the reason being that otherwise mail
is sent without a fully qualified domain name (so nobody can reply). (I believe
this problem can also be cured by using the fully qualified name in /etc/hosts
but this works for me.

This will get most mail out. However the tcpproto version of the configuration
file looks bust to me (i.e. the default one). Internet mail works fine but
bitnet mail dies in the rewrite process. I'm looking at alternative sendmail.cf
files.

-- 
Paul Bickerstaff                 Internet: pbickers@neon.chem.uidaho.edu
Physics Dept., Univ. of Idaho    Phone:    (208) 885 6809
Moscow ID 83843, USA             FAX:      (208) 885 6173