sendmail.cf -- Scalix 11 thing with smarthost auth

[Clemens]

It's me again... the guy who never gets sendmail smarthost auth to work...

following on from my little post in [/url]http://www.scalix.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=5265[url], I compared the original sendmail.cf with the one Scalix 11 created... what I found was that all the references to access or access.db were gone, and subsequently I cannot authenticate against the relay anymore... (at least that's my explanation)...

I like numbers, so I did a quick count and the word "access" appears 41 times more in the original sendmail.cf file - am I right to guess that this is the cause for the problem?

Before I go and start playing with it by rewriting the file by hand and messing it all up completely, I thought I might ask if there is a reason that the sendmail.cf file was changed in such a way or if that is a bug...

OR if anyone got auth working, please send me a message and tell me how!!!

Thanks!

Clemens
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[florian]

Hi Clemens,

Scalix does not change the presence of access db in sendmail.cf; however, we've changed the way we actually modify sendmail.cf, but in principle for the better.

In the past, the omsendin script which was run as part of the installation, did modify sendmail.cf directly, inserting the Scalix lines. It did not change any existing lines at all.

In Scalix11, we have moved to the "correct" approach, which is to provide a "Scalix" mailer definition, then add a single line ("MAILER('scalix')") to the sendmail.mc file and then run m4 to completely re-generate the sendmail.cf from that.

This is actually the way sendmail SHOULD be configured; no direct changes to sendmail.cf at all (and everybody who tried knows why...), just change the underlying .mc file and re-generate.

For all Linux distros I know (RedHat, SuSE, debian, ...), sendmail.mc ships in a state where the sendmail.cf used by the distro is matching up correctly, i.e. if one has access db, the other should have it as well (believe it's an optional FEATURE but would have to check). For your system, this does not seem to be the case so your sendmail.cf seems to have been generated from a .mc file that does not have this feature enabled.

You should check your mc file (it should be in /etc/mail/sendmail.mc); this should have a very last line referring to the scalix mailer (that would provide a check to see if it has been modified by Scalix) - apart from that look for accessdb config information in this file and see what's going on.

If this is your first time working with a mc file, please note that it has a very different method for commenting out things (lines starting with "dnl", not "#" or so...) than about any other type of Unix/Linux config file.

Florian.

[Clemens]

Ah now the interesting thing is that to my understanding SuSE does not have any sendmail.mc files (according to the sendmail FAQs) but makes one up on the go from some other system files... that's probably where the problem comes from, maybe scalix uses only half the information? Which file is it using the in the case of SuSE systems?

Thanks,

Clemens

[florian]

The script that does all the magic is /opt/scalix/bin/omsendin, so have a look for yourself.

on a SLES9 production system that we are running, I see a file called /etc/mail/linux.mc with the Scalix line added, so we somehow seem to use a mc-based mechanism. I think with SuSE it's not the way they do it by default (or at least hide the file generated by SuSEconfig) but the underlying mechanics are the same and the way we do it is a valid approach. You will probably have to tweak the linux.mc a little bit manually.

Cheers,
Florian.

[Clemens]

Right, I took the cheating approach and modified the omsendin to use the old approach and edit the cf file (the method was still present in the file...). I haven't fully tested it, but my first impression is that it works... Thanks Florian, so far so good... :-)

[florian]

well, it should proabably work, however it is not only the old mechanism for modifying that you're getting but probably also the old communication mechanism between sendmail and the directory - based on the ommapsmtp command over the newer mechanism which goes through ldap and uses the ldapmapper process.

Obviously something we should be looking into.

I'll open a bug in bugzilla for this.

cheers,
Florian.

[florian]

Actually, I did decide against opening a bug. I checked out the linux.mc and 1. it has all the framework for even more advanced sendmail features like accessdb in place and 2. it actually is a supported (albeit advanced) method for configuring sendmail on the suse platform...

Therefore, I think what we need to workout is to find which feature actually enables the access db lines in sendmail.cf

Florian.

[florian]

you might want to have a look at the comments in linux.mc, at the readme file in /etc/mail and at /usr/share/sendmail/ostype/suse-linux.m4.

the feature that you're looking for is called access_db

Hope this helps,
Florian.