🚀 go-pugleaf

One of my users was trying to set up vacation for his email and uncovered
a problem that I can't figure out...

We have a network of Suns running SunOS 4.1.x. User accounts are
distributed across a number of hard drives mounted on different machines.
These are all NFS mounted using automounter and NIS.

The mail system uses sendmail and is configured along the example in
Costales book, that is, one machine is the master server and all mail is
forwarded to it for processing. /var/mail/spool is NFS mounted on all
machines.

As a rule, each user has and user name (the first eight letters of the
lastname), an informal alias (first name) and and official email address
(first initial+lastname). In order to get sendmail to handle the official
email address we use NIS reverse mapping of aliases.

Aliases are entered in the /etc/alias file in the following general format:

informal: official
username: official
official: username@mailhost

example (for Andrew Montgomery):

andy: amontgomery
montgome: amontgomery
amontgomery: montgome@adler

We have been using this system over a year and a half now with no
problems, at least not until someone finally decided they wanted use the
vacation (I hate it when users want to do something-I mean just because
it's described in the manual and all ;-).

So...we start vacation from the mailtool (I have hand edited the .forward,
too. It doesn't make a difference). If mail is sent to the user at his
username (i.e., montgome) from within our net or from outside, vacation
functions as expected. If, however, mail is sent to one of the aliases
(i.e., andy or amontgomery), the sender receives no vacation notification.
The sendmal log shows that the message was piped to vacation but vacation
sends no message out and reports no errors.

There's a hook, though...One account that I tested (out of 5) worked! The
only difference between this account and the others is that it is located
physically on the mailhost. I have checked to make sure that partitions
with user home accounts are exported with -root option set for the
mailhost.

If anyone has any ideas as to why this is not working, I would appreciate
any pointers I get.

TIA,

-- 
David R. Steiner                                                ISPA                 
Research Assoc./Sys Admin                       University of Vechta
Remote Sensing/GIS                                   Vechta, Germany
*All decisions are based on insufficient evidence.-Nickel Hunsenmeir*