At 19:42 Uhr +0200 29.08.1997, Mason Loring Bliss wrote:
>On 7/15/97 at 1:16 AM +0200, Hauke Fath wrote:
>
>> I have been running my SE/30 as a mail&news-server on an UUCP feed for more
>> than half a year.
>
>Gaah! How?!?
>
>I'm having a hellish time understanding sendmail, and I don't have $30 for
>the book, although I'll get the book as soon as humanly possible. (I *do*
>have the sendmail pocket reference, but that doesn't explain things in
>sufficient detail for me, unfortunately.)

Errm... Run qmail like netbsd.org and macbsd.com and me?

I've got the bat book lying around and switching back to sendmail "just for
the fun of learning how to do it" still is somewhere mid-level on my
priority list. Part of my motivation is the nasty anti sendmail propaganda
of qmail's author which really turns me off.  On the other hand, the qmail
configuration "simply works" for me. Originally, I had a ppp link to the
outside world, a trustworthy SE/30 running NetBSD and TIS fwtk, and behind
that a Quadra running MacOS and all the Internet client stuff that is so
much nicer on MacOS than on a command line or on X11. So I told sendmail to
spool everything and the ppp script kicked off a queue run when the ppp
link was up and running.

Configuring qmail for this exact setup ("package all non-local mail and
send it when I tell you to") turned out to be dead simple. Even better:
where sendmail would try to contact the receiver's host directly and hang
forever if the link was bad, qmail would deliver the whole stuff to a local
smtp relay host.

Switching that setup to uucp delivery when I lost my university IP account
was equally simple.

>Is there *any* easy way to tell sendmail that uucp is its primary method of
>dealing with the world? I even got so far as to successfully poll for mail,
>pulling in a bunch, but then sendmail kicked in and instead of delivering
>the mail to mailboxes, it looked like it was going to try to repackage the
>mail and send it out somewhere.

As I understand it, it is not a trivial task to convince sendmail *not* to
consult a name server when resolving an address. Somewhere among the
sendmail sources there is a longish document on how to set up sendmail
which has a section about a uucp-only setup, but I haven't found much about
my setup: Use TCP/IP locally and deliver all non-local mail via uucp.

>PS: I don't run news yet, and I'll like not use uucp for it even if I do
>end up pulling it in at some point.

When sitting behind a dial-up link, doing news via uucp is very
recommendable. NNTP (like SMTP) is built around the notion of a leased
line, whereas news batches are usually compressed before they are sent via
uucp. Saves time and money, and setting up INN for uucp is not that
difficult. I'd even recommend running news over uucp if you are sitting
behind a dial-up IP line.

>Also, I'm running Taylor UUCP 1.06.1 on
>NetBSD/mac68k-current, July snapshot, with a custom -current kernel that's
>a couple days old. If it helps, here's where my stuff resides:
>
>mason$ ls /usr/local/bin/uu*

You realize that NetBSD comes packaged with with Taylor UUCP somewhere in
/usr/bin? All you would need from a vanilla Taylor UUCP package is the GNU
info documentation.

	hauke




--
"It's never straight up and down"     (DEVO)