🚀 go-pugleaf

First of all, I am a beginner as far as sendmail is concerned.

Secondly, I have done something that probably proves I am a
beginner...  :-)

But as a result, I have found that when I run newaliases it is
rejecting all the aliases in /usr/lib/aliases with the error
message "Cannot define an alias for names that are not local."
It started doing this right after I started mucking with rule
zero in sendmail.cf to transform all single-token addresses
into the form user@sys.domain.  

So, question #1 is why does newaliases apply the rewriting rules
to aliases?

Much of what I have read about sendmail talks about the virtues
of having a "master" mail machine, and minimal configurations on
all the others.  The book "Unix System Administration Handbook"
by Nemeth, Snyder and Seebass even gives a sample sendmail.cf
for a master machine, which I found very helpful.  

But what about the non-master machines??  How do they know who the
master is?  I mucked with rule zero to re-address all single-token
addresses to my "master", but the above result with newaliases
means that this approach, besides inefficiently sending all mail
to the master even when it really is local, also makes local aliases
impossible.  So obviously, this is a wrong approach, and shows
how much of a beginner I am.

Question #2 is: how do I implement this master-machine approach?  And
Is there a way that I can allow users to simply type "user" instead of 
"user@sys.domain" for all mail within our company?  Having 
/usr/lib/aliases* be symbolic links to files on a filesystem that is 
NFS mounted from our "master" won't work because some of our systems 
don't support symbolic links, and because our different types of 
machines use different filenames and formats for the actual aliases 
database.

And given that I am a beginner at this, please, please, please do refer
me to lucidly written manuals, books, postings, etc. that may shed some 
light on what I am doing.  (I've been through the documentation and
man pages on three different systems, and found no clues...  :-( )

Many thanks,

-rich

-- 
             Richard H. Schwartz, Scheduling Systems Inc.,
            1000 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA  02138
                  (617) 864 8330; FAX (617) 864 8377
                          rhs@world.std.com