[Novalug] Need a Sendmail Guru

James Ewing Cottrell III JECottrell3@Comcast.NET
Tue Oct 30 00:49:14 EDT 2012


After reading the entire thread, A few observations:

[0] Jason Kohles' answer is Absolutely Correct.
[1] If you are using NFS mounted Home Directories, it is a Bad Idea to 
put your .forward file in them, because:
(a) your home directory must be mounted
(b) it might not be available, causing your mail to be forwarded 
differently.
[2] All of your hosts but one (the Smart Host) should use (what Sun used 
to call) the "null client". Simply define a Smart Mailer like so:
DS smart-relay-host.example.com
[3] The Smart Relay host does the actual forwarding to google.
[4] Probably the best place to put the forward files is right next to 
the mailboxes go, so your mailbox would be /var/mail/chuck.payne and 
your forward file would be /var/mail/chuck.payne.forward. Or perhaps in 
a parallel directory: /var/forward/chuck.payne. There is a variable 
which specifies the location of the forward file, and it has escapes in 
it, such as %u for the user name.

Also note that if you allow full root access (nosquash) over NFS, that 
may count as a 'world writable' directory as well.

The DontBlameSendmail option only masks the symptoms.

JIM

On 10/24/2012 3:05 PM, Chuck Payne wrote:
> Guys,
>
> It's been years for me to work with sendmail. I have an issue there I
> don't know if it's sendmail or Google.
>
> A bit of history to help better understand
>
> We use Google for our mail. We have a server in our datacenter that
> sends log watch, nagios alerts, cron job, and so forth. This would
> then send be forward to Google.
>
> Everything was working until the other day, no files have been
> changed, but now I am get the following errors on my server and no
> messages are being sent to Goggle.
>
>
> Oct 24 16:36:39 post sendmail[13666]: q9OGadCV013666:
> from=<nagios@rosetta.performancematters.com>, size=634, class=0,
> nrcpts=1, msgid=<201210241454.q9OEsV4h024162@rosetta.performancematters.com>,
> proto=ESMTP, daemon=MTA, relay=rosetta [10.0.0.7]
> Oct 24 16:36:39 post sendmail[13667]: q9OGadCV013666: forward
> /mnt/nas-sgd2/home/chuck.payne/.forward.post: World writable directory
> Oct 24 16:36:39 post sendmail[13667]: q9OGadCV013666: forward
> /mnt/nas-sgd2/home/chuck.payne/.forward: World writable directory
> Oct 24 16:36:39 post sendmail[13667]: q9OGadCV013666:
> to=<chuck.payne@performancematters.com>, delay=00:00:00,
> xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=local, pri=30861, dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent
>
>
> It says the message is sent, but what got me worried is this
>
> Oct 24 16:36:39 post sendmail[13667]: q9OGadCV013666: forward
> /mnt/nas-sgd2/home/chuck.payne/.forward.post: World writable directory
> Oct 24 16:36:39 post sendmail[13667]: q9OGadCV013666: forward
> /mnt/nas-sgd2/home/chuck.payne/.forward: World writable directory
>
> We don't have any .forward, this started just a couple days ago. No
> clue why sendmail is saying that
>
> Also I am seeing this alot
>
> Oct 24 16:38:37 post sendmail[14153]: q9OGcbUF014153:
> post.performancematters.com [10.0.0.53] (may be forged) did not issue
> MAIL/EXPN/VRFY/ETRN during connection to MTA
>
> This is also new...
>
> Can someone that is a Sendmail guru help. Please note, production box,
> can change to postfix. Tried that fight already.
>
>




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