🚀 go-pugleaf

Luke Guest <Luke@aka100.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> Hi all,

> I have been trying to get an email transfer agent to work with Redhat 6.1
> and my Demon account. Unfortunately, I have lost a lot of email whilst
> trying to set up Sendmail and I'm sick of trying to get it to work. Could
> some kind people reply to me personally to try and help me?

Ah yes. You're almost certainly bouncing it (which is
how Sendmail is set-up out of the RH6 box.) Been there,
done that... :-(

> Is there any way of monitoring what's actually happening with Sendmail?

Yup. Examine your logs. /var/log/maillog in RH6. Mind
you, it isn't the most helpful thing in the world to
a novice.

> Is there an easy way to configure Sendmail?

Depends what you mean by 'easy'. Linuxconf gives
you a GUI interface from Gnome, but it still isn't
very helpful unless you know what you're doing.

I found Stefan David's docs at www.hopf.d.c.u to
be the fastest way of getting things up and running
when I've done it.

> I have set up my machine to be my actual Demon node (nebulas) with my demon
> IP (whatever that is) number - this was done after I had it set up
> differently. I set it up going through Demon's Slackware README file - from
> the FTP site. This seems to work and I can connect using rp3 to Demon and do
> stuff, i.e. ftp, telnet, http, etc.

> Essentially, I need to the email working so that I can email other people on
> the local machine - really me - without the email going out through Demon
> and back again. I also want to be able to send email remotely that will go
> through Demon. How do I do this? Ho do I stop all my email from bouncing or
> whatever is happening to it when I connect to Demon?

This took me a while to get my head around as well.
The clincher for me was realizing that IP numbers 
get allocated to interfaces rather than to machines.
So your demon IP gets allocated to your ppp interface,
but you might have another IP allocated to your ethernet
interface. And then there's the localhost interface,
which the machine uses to refer to itself. In order for
sendmail to work properly, you need to have those interfaces
all correctly configured, and sendmail needs to be told
explicitly to accept e-mail addressed to the names that
correspond with those interfaces, and where that email
should be routed to.

But I think if someone had tried to tell me that when
I was first trying to get my head around it, it wouldn't
have meant anything at all to me. So just follow the
instructions at www.hopf.demon.co.uk and you'll be fine.

> I have tried reading the documentation, which are: lacking in many respects
> and about as useful as a chocolate teapot!

I thought that at first. Now, I recognize that the info
is actually there in the docs, but it's just extremely
poorly organized, and so extremely difficult to find. 
It's more helpful as a reference than as a recipe for
getting a working configuration from scratch.




-- 
peter@flimbag.co.uk

Please insert the word NOSPAM into the above address to ensure
that your unsolicited e-mail doesn't actually reach me.