Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!helps!bigtex!james
From: james@bigtex.cactus.org (James Van Artsdalen)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sysv386
Subject: Re: sendmail broken??
Message-ID: <51277@bigtex.cactus.org>
Date: 16 Dec 90 10:14:31 GMT
References: <1990Dec5.084730.5227@santra.uucp> <1990Dec15.140142.23689@gozer.UUCP>
Reply-To: james@bigtex.cactus.org (James Van Artsdalen)
Organization: Institute of Applied Cosmology, Austin TX
Lines: 26

In <1990Dec15.140142.23689@gozer.UUCP>, klm@gozer.UUCP (Kevin L. McBride)
	wrote:

| Dec  5 10:57:07 localhost sendmail[7967]: 4 aliases, longest 16 bytes, 74 bytes total
| Dec  5 11:27:07 localhost sendmail[7973]: 4 aliases, longest 16 bytes, 74 bytes total

> rebuild the alias database at every queue interval (typically 30 minutes
> or 1 hour) but that's where the message is coming from.  It's not a
> problem, really, just an annoyance.

sendmail is designed to use a dbm database to hold the aliases.  When
you compile sendmail without dbm, it sort of acts like it needs to
rebuild the database file every time it is run, as a method of reading
in the aliases file.  Berkeley probably isn't terribly interested in
doing more graceful support for SysV...

> Yes, sendmail is braindead... but it can be made to work.

sendmail actually works pretty well.  The difficulty of sendmail.cf is
greatly exaggerated - if you can use grep(1) for anything more
complicated than a constant string, you can figure out rulesets.

The sendmail source is freely available.
-- 
James R. Van Artsdalen          james@bigtex.cactus.org   "Live Free or Die"
Dell Computer Co    9505 Arboretum Blvd Austin TX 78759         512-338-8789