sendmail, aliases and NIS+

Carroll, Jim jcarro10 at sprintspectrum.com
Fri Mar 29 04:56:18 EST 2002


Hhhmmm.... I wasn't familiar with the -dx.y option.  Thanks!

When I run sendmail -bt -dx.y, it tells me that NIS is supported, but
there's no mention of NISPLUS.

Presently the smarterhost we've been using is a mail server operated by
another group within our company.  I don't think it would be a good
assumption to say that that mail server would know what to do with a message
addressed simply "jcarro10".

So it appears these are my options:

1. Get the source for sendmail and compile in NIS+ support.

2. Get an alternate MTA (eg, Postfix) and make sure that NIS+ support is
compiled in.

3. Set up sendmail on the Linux hosts as "nullclient" (as per your
suggestion) and configure a Solaris machine to act as a mail relay.  (This
would require buy-in by the rest of my group.)  Again, this could be
Sendmail, or it could be Postfix, or whatever.

4. Manage /etc/aliases on all the Linux hosts with something like rsync.
(Er, wasn't the whole point of NIS+ to avoid these sorts of workarounds?)

5. Some other solution that I haven't considered yet.

Thoughts?

Jim

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dirk Wetter [mailto:dirkw at rentec.com]
> Sent: Thursday, March 28, 2002 10:32 AM
> To: Carroll, Jim
> Cc: Linux-Nisplus (E-mail)
> Subject: Re: sendmail, aliases and NIS+
> 
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> i think i ran into this, too. what i did: configure your Linux box to
> be a "nullclient", so that the mailserver, which should be a "real"
> NIS+ client does the alias expansion. confusing is that 
> sendmail -bt -dx.y
> reports to support NISPLUS.
> 
> On Thu, 28 Mar 2002, Carroll, Jim wrote:
> 
> > I'm just now noticing a peculiar problem.
> >
> > On a Solaris8 NIS+ client, sendmail appears to 
> recognize/understand/resolve
> > from the aliases (mail_aliases) table.
> >
> > On a Linux (2.4.7-10) NIS+ client, sendmail appears to have 
> no such clue.
> >
> > Yes, the following entry is in the Linux nsswitch.conf file:
> >
> > 	aliases:	files nisplus
> >
> > The test user (myself) doesn't exist in /etc/passwd (or 
> /etc/shadow), but
> > *does* exist in the NIS+ tables of same.  And yet, when (as 
> root) I do a
> > simple "echo hello | mail jcarro10", it ends up dumping it 
> to the local
> > /var/spool/mail/jcarro10 file.
> >
> > Yes, the following entry exists in the NIS+ aliases table:
> >
> > 	jcarro10: jcarro10 at sprintspectrum.com
> >
> > Yes, if I do "echo hello | mail 
> jcarro10 at sprintspectrum.com", the mail ends
> > up going where I want it to.
> >
> > Sendmail just doesn't seem to be NIS+ aware.
> >
> > Suggestions where to start looking?
> >
> > Jim
> >
> 
> 
> cheers,
>         ~dirkw
> __________________________________
> Dirk Wetter @ Renaissance Techn.
> mailto:<dirkw at rentec dot com>
> 
> 




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