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Article #6633

sendmail bug and work around

#6633
From: Bryan Costales
Date: Sat, 19 Jan 1991 00:51
36 lines
2086 bytes
The sendmail supplied by Sun (4.1 and 4.1.1) has a bug which causes commas
to be included with user names when -oR routing is in effect.  This causes
problems on diskless clients that have /var/spool/mail nfs mounted.
sendmail recognizes that they are nfs mounted and automatically turns on
routing to the yp (NIS) server. In this mode, comma delimited lists of
recipients are sent with the comma attached. This can be demonstrated
thusly:

$ /usr/lib/sendmail -oRmailhost -v user1, user2
Trying 128.32.201.15...  connected.
220 mailhost Sendmail 4.1/SMI-4.0 ready at Fri, 18 Jan 91 16:43:58 PST
>>HELO myhost.my.domain
250 mailhost Hello myhost.my.domain, pleased to meet you
>>MAIL FROM:<myname>
250 <user1>... Sender ok
>>RCPT TO:<user1,>
550 <user1,>... User unknown

Notice that not only is the comma wrongly included, but sendmail begins to
send the message before it has collected one.

[[Ed's Note: I don't think the 550 <user1,>... User unknown message
indicates that sendmail is trying to send the message, it is simply
verifying the existance of the userid you are trying to send to. This is
standard behavior in my experience. -bdg]]

The workaround is to make sure that /var/spool/mail is a symbolic link on
diskless hosts, something like:

/var/spool/mail -> /n/mailhost/usr/share/mail

I have not heard back from Sun yet as to whether this is a known bug or
not.

Bryan Costales - Systems Manager - International Computer Science Institute
Internet:(work) costales@icsi.berkeley.edu     (home) bcx@lady.berkeley.edu
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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!utzoo!utgpu!cunews!bnrgate!brtph3!brchh104!brchs1!bnr.ca!rice.edu!sun-spots-request
From: costales@ICSI.Berkeley.EDU (Bryan Costales)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun
Subject: sendmail bug and work around
Keywords: Software
Message-ID: <1379@brchh104.bnr.ca>
Date: 19 Jan 91 00:51:04 GMT
Sender: news@brchh104.bnr.ca
Organization: Sun-Spots
Lines: 36
Approved: Sun-Spots@rice.edu
X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 27, message 7
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