Article View: comp.mail.misc
Article #1168Smail release 3.1.27 is now available
From: Ronald S. Karr
Date: Wed, 09 Sep 1992 07:11
Date: Wed, 09 Sep 1992 07:11
576 lines
26798 bytes
26798 bytes
Smail release 3.1.27 is now available. This message lists the changes
in this release, and in release 3.1.26. The last section in this
message lists the archive sites that you can use to get a copy of the
release. Not all archive sites have acknowledged obtaining the new
release.
Release 3.1.26 was not announced on USENET, due to some mixups in
communication with some key archive sites. Release 3.1.26 was a
very large release, including about 900K of diffs. Due to the large
size, I am not making available a patch to move from the 3.1.25
release. If you are currently running release 3.1.25 or earlier,
you will need to get a complete distribution from one of the archive
sites mentioned below.
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CHANGES IN THE 3.1.27 RELEASE
Release 3.1.27 is a patch release to smail3.1.26. This release is
primarily a bug fix, portability-enhancement release. The total size
of the patch is larger than I expected it to be, based on the number
of bugs fixed, but the changes aren't very intrusive, so users with
custom enhancements should not have too many problems integrating them
into this release.
Also, at the time of the 3.1.27 release, I have a reasonably large
backlog of changes that I intend to include in a near-term release.
However, some of the fixes in this release are of sufficiently high
priority that I don't want to delay the release further to include any
more changes.
Changes in this release:
* A bug in the DNS lookup routines was fixed which was causing core
dumps in dn_expand().
* The SHELL variable can now be set on the make command line. This
allows the use of alternate, /bin/sh-compatible shells. Some
systems (notably Ultrix and Xenix) have /bin/sh bugs which can be
worked around by using a different shell. I have also tried to
reduce the complexity of some shell scripts, in hopes that more
native shells will work correctly without needing to introduce
workarounds.
* Add an AUTH_DOMAINS list to the EDITME file (alternately,
auth_domains in the config file) for setting a list of domains for
which your machine is authoritative. This prevents the smarthost
router from matching non-existing hosts in domains for which your
host has complete routing information. I included this in this
release, despite the fact that it is an enhancement, because the
change is small and because interactions with the smarthost router
have caused significant confusion lately. paths files can be used
for similar purposes, but smail has come to be used more
extensively on pure Internet machines, which often lack paths
files. Explaining why paths files must be used has become more
trouble for me than it is worth.
* The visible_domains and more_hostnames config file variables can
now be set with the names "domains" and "gateway_names" for
compatibility with the EDITME file. Again, explaining the
differences here were becoming more trouble than the trouble of
just making this change.
* Some problems with uses of the tolower() function have (I hope)
been fixed. Unfortunately (I guess), I don't have any non-POSIX
systems any more, so I can't tell if my fixes are sufficient.
* Some changes to the motorolla delta system configuration file were
contributed by Francesco Potorti` <pot@fly.cnuce.cnr.it>.
* Updates to the A/UX samples and conf/os files were added, as
contributed by Bob Denny.
* A typo in the next2.0 configuration file was fixed. Contributors
working on NeXT systems have been driving me a bit nuts, given
that their editor appears to add newlines and blank lines in the
middle of patch files. I usually have to apply their patch files
by hand and I haven't always managed to compensate.
* A typo in the sun_os4 configuration file was fixed. This one was
purely my fault; I can't blame it on anyone else.
* Nigel Metheringham contributed conf/os/mips-bsd4.3.
* Some problems with timezones were (hopefully) corrected for NeXT
machines.
* I completely rewrote conf/os/isc2.2.1. I ripped out all of the
POSIX features. Attempts to use POSIX features ran into too many
header file problems. Also, what worked with the version of ISC
that I have access to didn't work with isc3.0. The new file
should be sufficiently generic to work with most recent releases
of Interactive. I have NOT tested this with gcc. If this
configuration file doesn't work with gcc, then don't use gcc.
* For systems that have the dbm.h or ndbm.h file in an awkward
location, the MISC_DEFINES variables DBM_INCLUDE and NDBM_INCLUDE
can be set to indicate the include paths to use. See
conf/os/template for details.
* A size_t reference in string.c, which was causing problems
compiling on a number of systems, was changed to an "int".
* The Date header now indicates (by default) the time that the spool
file was created, rather than the time of message delivery.
* Some typos in the smail(5) man page, with respect to UK-only bind
attributes, were fixed. The attribute names should now appear
when you format the man page.
* I changed some of the scripts in samples/bsmtp to work better in
the face of queue directories that exceed ARGMAX. Some alternate
scripts were contributed which I may use instead, in a future
release.
* I changed the sender_proto (the name supplied after the "with"
keyword in Received lines) for batched-SMTP input to "bsmtp".
Compressed, batched input is now "cbsmtp".
* Several bugs were fixed in the samples/generic/* file. In
particular, for directors a missing ':' was added and a comment in
the "lists" entry describing sender_okay was corrected. For
transports, notify_comsat was added to the default "local"
transport.
* The program invocation caused by invoking smail as "newaliases" or
with the "-bi" option, was changed to reset the effective user and
group IDs to the real user and group IDs. The previous release
did (correctly) reset the uid and gid if -oA was used to specify
an alternate aliases file, but it probably allowed any user to
rebuild the regular alias file. I say probably, because a bug was
causing the uid and gid to be set to random stack garbage, which
must have been 0 on most systems that tried the feature.
* The accept() call on some systems (notably some SVR4 variants,
though not the one I use) fail if descriptors 0 and 1 aren't in
use. Smail now opens /dev/null on descriptors 0 and 1, when
operating as a daemon.
* The spool file format was changed (in an upward compatible, though
not backward-compatible fashion) so that blank arguments do not
screw up the argument list stored in spool files. In earlier
releases, a blank argument, such as -F "", could corrupt the spool
file, since it used a blank line to separate an argument list from
the header list. I am rather surprised that this bug has managed
to stay around so long. It is an original design flaw.
* The HELO, RCPT TO, and MAIL FROM requests in SMTP now require a
non-empty argument. However, the argument to HELO is still not
checked for validity.
* An extraneous utimbuf declaration was removed from src/sysdep.c
that was causing difficulties with compilation on some systems.
* The files contrib/micnet/*.dif were removed. These patch files
were no longer relevent, since the files that they were relative
to have changed substantially.
* Split changes into a separate file from the README file. It is
likely that the README file will split further in future releases.
Some users have commented the the README file has become a bit
unwieldy.
A short list of changes not included in 3.1.27, which will likely be
included in 3.1.28:
* Some authentication of the sending hostname, based on IP addresses
versus the name supplied in the HELO line to SMTP.
* Some enhancements to the message-retry/message-timeout logic,
including logic to remove stale files. For now, the following
shell command can be used periodically to remove stale files:
find /usr/spool/smail/retry -type -f -mtime +7 -exec rm {} \;
Removing files older than the message-retry interval is reasonably
safe, since message-timeout logic is based on the modify time of a
message spool file, not on retry files.
* A rerouter driver, submitted by Uwe Doering. To remain
consistent with previous statements, I must restate that I dislike
hosts that do auto-rerouting. However, this appears to be
necessary on the European continent, given the rather arbitrary
and beaurocratic nature of goings on there.
* Significant changes to the logging code, to make log entries much
more readable, if less grep-able. The changes were submitted by
Uwe Doering. It will be relatively trivial to convert log files
for use with grep. Perl scripts should have little problem with
the new format, although be warned that all existing perl scripts
will have to be rewritten for use with the next release. The
smaillog program will be modified to account for the new format,
since it is included in the release.
CONTRIBUTORS TO RELEASE 3.1.27
Contributors to this release include Bob Denny, Uwe Doering, Greg Hackney,
Philip Hazel, Ron Heiby, Nigel Metheringham, Jim O'Connor, Chip Salzenberg,
Brian Taylor, Bill Trost, and Stephen J. Walick.
CHANGES IN THE 3.1.26 RELEASE
Release 3.1.26 is a patch release to smail3.1.25. This release is
primarily a functionality enhancement release. A number of bugs have
been fixes as well.
The total number of changes is quite large. As a result, people with
customizations which were not included in 3.1.26 may have a fair amount
of work to do.
Important enhancements in this release:
* Greatly enhanced expansion strings, with conditionals and file
lookups. The original version of this code was written by
Chip Salzenberg.
* Per-transport-configurable header insertion and removal based
on the new expansion code. In addition, the "From:" header can
now be configured, including the ability to use a file to find
a long form for local users (e.g, to get ronald.s.karr). The
configurable header insertion/removal support can be used to
support the Content-Length field, by adding the following
generic attributes to the local transport:
remove_header="Content-Length",
append_header="Content-Length: $body_size"
Of some value with SVR4, you can also add a Content-Type
header field, if no Content-Type field already exists, with:
append_header="${if !header:Content-Type Content-Type: text}"
* The default Received: header now contains the "from" and "with"
keywords, where such information is available. Information is
determined from the HELO line in SMTP, the From_ line in regular
uucp mail, or it can be set using the -oMr and -oMs options, for
compatibility with sendmail.
* Smail can now limit connections to the SMTP server, as long as
a standalone smail SMTP daemon is used, rather than using inetd
to start smtpd per connection attempt. Two levels are provided:
a maximum number of connections that yield immediate message
delivery, and a maximum number of allowed connections. This can
greatly help the maximum load that smail places on a server,
while allowing fast delivery if the server has light mail
activity. This code was contributed by Chip Salzenberg.
* Smail now tracks host accessibility for SMTP delivery. If a host
is down, then mail to that host will be deferred immediately
(rather than waiting for a connection timeout) until a definable
time period expires. In addition, mail that is undeliverable for
a definable time period will be bounced, rather than hanging around
in the smail queues forever. The parameters for retry times and
message timeouts are configurable on a per-host or per-domain
basis. Several implementations of these capabilities were
submitted, including implementations by Syd Weinstein and Dan Danz.
I decided on a version by Chip Salzenberg, which included per-host
configurability, and which (eventually) supported the host
accessibility tracking.
* Interactive SMTP receive processes can now timeout. By default,
SMTP command receipt times out after 5 minutes, and receipt of a
message after a DATA statement times out after 2 hours. This was
added after an urgent, but gentle, request of Heiko Schlichting,
who had 100 receiver processes hanging around waiting forever for
SMTP input. The specific timeouts can be modified in the run-time
config file by setting smtp_receive_command_timeout (default 5m)
and smtp_receive_message_timeout (default 2h).
* Support was added for JANET reverse-order domain lookups in the
bind router. Contact Philip Hazel <ph10@cus.cam.ac.uk> for
complete support. The smail3 release contains only that code
that needs to be within the smail binary itself.
* Added support for NeXT netinfo databases (from Dan Danz).
* The DNS can now be queried within the tcpsmtp transport, without
involving the bind router driver. In previous releases, MX
records could be used only if addresses were resolved by the
bind router. Now, under configuration control, the tcpsmtp
transport driver can locate MX records itself, such as for
mail routed by a local paths file or by a queryprogram router.
This support was added, at my request, by Chip Salzenberg.
* Added a -oX flag to smail that sets the TCP port number used to
listen for SMTP connections. This is helpful in testing, because
this (along with the "service" attribute to the tcpsmtp driver)
can be used to setup a test network that operates independently
of an existing SMTP network. This can be used to make sure that
smail works on your network before replacing an existing mailer.
* The smail installation process now attempts to preserve replaced
binaries from your original operating system in .SAV files. Thus,
your existing /bin/rmail and /usr/lib/sendmail will not be
removed, even if smail is reinstalled several times. Previous
releases would (sometimes) keep one backup version (with a .O
suffix), which would then be removed on the next install. The
new process makes a .SAV backup file, if one does not exist
already, allowing a one-time backup copy on the first installation
of smail. .SAV backup files are made only for files that are
considered likely to provided in the base operating system.
* The uuwho utility now uses searches for domain information, if
a full hostname match is not found. For example, the command:
uuwho mitsu.veritas.com
will find the entry for .veritas.com, which does exist while
no entry for mitsu.veritas.com exists. This was added by
Chip Salzenberg.
* By "popular demand" :include: in mailing list and alias files
can now be followed by white-space. This is for compatibility
with sendmail. Comments are NOT allowed after :include:. For
example, the following line:
:include: /list-directory/mailing-list
would previously have resulted in errors, but will now result
in inclusion of addresses in the file /list-directory/mailing-list.
* The -bi option from sendmail is now supported, and newaliases is
now yet another link to smail. This support was added to allow
existing YP makefiles (which call /usr/lib/sendmail to rebuild
the YP mail.aliases dbm file) to use smail3 replacing sendmail.
The original version of this enhancement was submitted by
Bruce Jerrick.
* The sdbm library is now integrated in the smail release. Systems
that do not have a native ndbm library now use the sdbm functions
to provide multiple DBM-like files. Native dbm (not ndbm)
libraries can be used only if they support the dbmclose() function.
This was added by Chip Salzenberg, who was planning to use this
in association with his host status monitoring code, but later
realized the error of his ways. But, the changes were left in
because they seemed reasonable.
* The comsat daemon is now supported in the appendfile driver, and
is enabled, by default, in the "local" transport.
* Mail which results in all recipients being eliminated (such as
through duplicate elimination or sender elimination within a
mailing list), will generate a bounce message.
Some other changes:
* The sender_okay flag (for configuring removal of the sender
from aliasing and mailing list expansion) can now be configured
from the EDITME file.
* Pathalias was updated to match the most recent release available
on uunet.
* The compile process now echoes the results of variable substitition.
The previous release would generate lines such as:
. ./defs.sh; $CC $CFLAGS $INCLUDES -c foo.c
now, compiles will generate something like:
gcc -O -I/usr/include -c foo.c
make -n will still yield annoyingly small amounts of real information.
* A sufficiently high debugging level will now enable debugging in
the resolver library.
* Included some minor revisions to the bind router by Syd
Weinstein, to fetch A records as a second pass after fetching
MX records. Apparently, there are differences in what different
servers return in a request for MX records (some return A
records, too, some don't).
* Sytems that require an alternate set of #include files to compile
programs that use TCP/IP and sockets can define those #include
files in the conf/os files or in the EDITME file. See
conf/os/template for details.
* Added some AUX support contributed by Robert B. Denny, which can
be found in samples/AUX-support. Most of the changes relate to
printing documentation. Some sample configuration files are
also included.
* Smail now uses SO_REUSEADDR and some appropriate descriptor closes,
to allow the smtp/queue-run daemon to be restarted cleanly even
if a receiver process has been forked. Previous releases could get
errors in the bind() call indicating an address already in use.
* A new attribute was added to the gethostbyname router
(only_local_domain) that disables matching of hosts outside of
the local domain. This was addedy by Dan Danz.
* Man pages were previously installed with mode 555. They are now
installed with mode 444.
* Added a NOTES directory containing messages that I have sent or
received that illustrate various points of interest.
* Building of uuwho databases now differentiates between a #N line
introducing a hostname, and a #NOTE, or #North America line
introducing a random comment. Recent map entries caused
extra, bogus, entries to be added to uuwho databases.
* "A" records are now used in the order returned by DNS resolver
lookups. Previously releases would reverse the A records, due
to the way these records were being added to a list, internally.
The RFCs require that A records be used in order, since they may
be sorted by network preference.
* The local-* transports for local-form delivery to remote hosts
now does proper hop-count checking. These transports use the
new local_xform attribute which does local-form transformations
without indicating that delivery is actually local.
Some bug fixes:
* Mail to systems with no MX records, but an A record, will now be
handled correctly by the bind router. I have regular posted a
patch for this to various newsgroups and mailing lists, but did
not include the fix in an earlier official patch release.
* Fixed some minor problems with bounce-message generation. Bounce
messages are generated by reinvoking smail and sending the
bounce messages as a batched SMTP script. The sender was
specified as <>, in accordance with RFC822, which smail considered
a remote address. However, treating this as mail from a remote
system was inappropriate, so an alternate sender token <+>, is
now used to indicate a locally-generated bounce message.
* Nul-terminated some generated strings that were not consistently
nul terminated.
* Fixed some problems resulting from routers that resolve to the
local host, requiring further routing of the remainder address.
* Fixed some problems in the trusted-code logic that was running
into problems with the SMTP interaction generated by MH.
* Errors in .forward files now generate bounces to real-<username>
rather than to the postmaster.
* NEWS_SPOOL_DIR was not being stored in the defs.h file, yielding
incorrect behavior from uuwho.
* Fixed some problems with interactions between the -t and -f options.
* Fixed some problems with varargs usage in log.c.
* Include <vfork.h> for Suns, to avoid a problem interacting with
-O on Sun4's that could generate core dumps.
* Fixed some segmentaion violations caused by bogus @foo addresses.
* Fixed most (all?) places where smail was using a value immediately
after it was freed. This allows smail to work, unmodified, with
the SVR3 -lmalloc library, or other versions of malloc that don't
leave data from the last free unmodified.
* get_sender_addr(), which generates the sender address in various
important contexts, was returning the same data between multiple
calls, when it should have been returning different data.
CONTRIBUTORS TO RELEASE 3.1.26
This patch was made possible primarily through the work of Chip
Salzenberg, who contributed the first version of the enhanced string
expansion code (though I extended it rather a lot), the SMTP connection
limiting code, the reorganized bind code, plus the changes for the
retry file. He also contributed a large number of minor enhancements
and bug fixes.
I don't have a good record of who else contributed code, fixes and
suggestions for this patch, but here is a partial list:
Tomas Ahl, Jack Bailey, Alan P Barrett, Mark Bixby, Randy Bush,
Dan Danz, Bob Denny, Jon Diekema, Michael Faurot, David J. Fiander,
Bill Hargen, Philip Hazel, Bill Heiser, Peter Honeyman, Bruce Jerrick,
Patrick Lee, Simon Leinen, Hillel Markowitz, Bill Masek, Jan-Piet Mens,
Les Mikesell, Lyndon Nerenberg, Jim O'Connor, Jim Pickering, Steve Piette,
Francesco Potorti`, Heiko Schlichting, David Schmidt, Monty Solomon,
Brian Taylor, Bill Trost, Gary S. Trujillo, Stephen J. Walick,
Lauren Weinstein, Syd Weinstein, and Andreas Wettengel.
HOW TO GET THIS RELEASE
The patch from 3.1.26 to release 3.1.27 is 81481 bytes (compressed).
If you cannot obtain the current patch file, or future patch files,
from one of the archive sites below, I will send it via E-mail. I do
send the release itself via E-mail. To obtain patches, send mail to
the address:
smail-patch@veritas.com
Smail-3.1.27 as a 956141 byte compressed tar file, or as a 81481 byte
compressed patch file is available from the following archive sites:
Server: uunet, ftp.uu.net
Files: /networking/mail/smail/smail-3.1.27.tar.Z
/networking/mail/smail/smail.diff-3.1.26-3.1.27.Z
Location: Falls Curch, Virginia, USA
Contact: info@uunet.uu.net
Comments: UUNET has a 900 number, for access at very reasonable cost
from anywhere in the US. The cost is 50 cents per minute,
charged to your phone bill. The phone number is
1-900-468-7727. Login is "uucp" with no passwd. All uunet
modems are Telebit modems, so they support most common US
modem protocols.
Canada: (416) 368 6621
Contact: uunet-ca@uunet.uu.net
India: +91 842 238007
Contact: info%uunet-in@uunet.uu.net
Server: FTP.FU-Berlin.DE [130.133.4.50]
Files: pub/unix/mail/smail/smail-3.1.27.tar.Z
pub/unix/mail/smail/smail.diff-3.1.26-3.1.27.Z
Location: Berlin, Germany
Contact: ftp-adm@FU-Berlin.DE
Comment: (From Vera Heinau): I wish to point out that the lines to
Germany are sometimes (always ? ;-) very slow so people from
overseas might prefer other servers.
Server: ftp.msen.com
Files: /pub/packages/smail-3.1.27.tar.Z
/pub/packages/smail.diff-3.1.26-3.1.27.Z
Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
Contact: ftp-service@msen.com
Server: lth.se [130.235.16.3]
Files: pub/mail/smail/smail-3.1.27.tar.Z
pub/mail/smail/smail.diff-3.1.26-3.1.27.Z
Location: Sweden
Contact: Joergen Haegg <jh@efd.lth.se>
Archive sites that have release 3.1.26, but have not yet acknowledged
installing release 3.1.27:
Server: stasys, stasys.sta.sub.org, sta.sub.org
Files: /pub/src/smail.tar.Z
Location: Southern Germany
Contact: Frank Kaefer <fkk@stasys.sta.sub.org>
Comments: stasys allows anyone to dialin without change. The phone
number is +49 8151 21250. Login is "anonuucp" password is
"anonuucp". The modem accepts 1200 and 2400 baud, V.32, and
PEP.
Server: archive.EU.net, ftp.EU.net, mcsun.EU.net
Files: ~/mail/smail/smail-3.1.26.tar.Z
Location: Holland
Contact: info-admin@EU.net
Server: ftp.nluug.nl, sun4nl.nluug.nl
Files: ~/pub/mail/smail/smail-3.1.26.tar.Z
Location: Holland
Contact: info-admin@EU.net
Server: ftp.ee.und.ac.za
Files: /pub/unix/smail3/smail-3.1.26.tar.Z
Location: Durban, South Africa
Contact: ftp@ftp.ee.und.ac.za
Server: compaq.com
Files: /pub/smail-3.1.26.tar.Z
Location: Houston, Texas, USA
Contact: Greg Hackney <hackney@compaq.com>
--
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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!sparky!uunet!haven.umd.edu!ames!data.nas.nasa.gov!taligent!apple!veritas!tron From: tron@Veritas.COM (Ronald S. Karr) Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc,comp.mail.uucp,alt.sources Subject: Smail release 3.1.27 is now available Message-ID: <1992Sep09.071107.29955@Veritas.COM> Date: 9 Sep 92 07:11:07 GMT Followup-To: comp.mail.misc Organization: VERITAS Software Corp. Lines: 576