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From: nowicki%rose@Sun.COM (Bill Nowicki)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail,comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: Overexpansion of aliases
Summary: More misinformation
Message-ID: <67449@sun.uucp>
Date: 8 Sep 88 17:48:48 GMT
References: <938@amelia.nas.nasa.gov> <945@amelia.nas.nasa.gov> <298@execu.UUCP> <21282@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
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In article <21282@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>, karl@triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) writes:
> dewey@execu.uucp writes:
>    We were told at a Sun 4.0 seminar that the yellow pages domain as host
>    is a new 'feature'.  Good luck.
> 
> Misfeature.  Bug.  Bad bug.

Let me try to clarify this.  In SunOS 4.0 sendmail, the $m macro is
pre-defined to be the YP domain name (with a mapping described in the
manual).  Thus IF YOU WISH you can have the exact same sendmail.cf file
on all machines, regardless of your domain.  This was necessary for our
own network, with five thousand machines in many sub-domains.  It was
just not practical to manually edit all five thousand configuration
files.  If you chose to not use this pre-defined macro, then you are
free to hack the sendmail.cf as before.  Old sendmail.cf files should
still work.  4.0 also had many of the IDA features like arbitrary
number of tokens in class matches, for domains of any number of levels.

> It might be nice if I could have my mail-addressing domain name and my
> YP domain name be the same.  I can't.  

One solution would be to create a short synonym for the long name.
Just put a single symbolic link in the /var/yp directory and the YP
server will support both domains.  This also aids in domain name
transitions.

> What did you do, Sun?  Develop
> PC-NFS on a bunch of SysV-filesystem machines somewhere?

No, it was developed on and for an archaic operating system called MS-DOS!

> I have a theory for it: Because Sun is BREAKING
> things left and right in the interests of `features.'

If there are actual things "broken", then please file a big report with
your service representative.  Emotional flaming on Usenet will not be
as likely to get your problem fixed, because we only have time to read
Usenet about once a month (too busy fixing all the reported bugs).

The original problem that started this discussion had nothing to do
sendmail.cf.  It was purely an aliases issue.  SunOS 3.x had a
"feature" that tacked on the YP domain name if a YP alias resolved to a
name with no domain part in it.  Since people complained about this
"feature" it was taken out in SunOS 4.0.  Upgrading to the latest
release would have solved this person's problem.  So would putting
domain parts into the alias file, (e.g. user@host instead of just user)
which is probably a good idea anyway.

> `They think because they have always done it right in the past that
> they will always do it right in the future.'

Not true.  But if you tell us what you want, then all we can do is fix
it in the next release.  For example, people have asked for direct
resolver support, so we will try to provide that in the next release.
Sorry, but we do not have a time machine to go back and fix releases
that were done years ago. Note that SunOS 4.0 DID have a version of
sendmail linked directly with the resolver. A shared libc with the
resolver was done by Hedrick@Rutgers, if you cannot wait.

	-- Bill Nowicki
	   Sun Microsystems