Sendmail startup problems, Help!
 

Hi all,

I have sendmail installed on a RH 8 Pro server. Now, I had to wipe and rebuild the server for reasons I won't get into, but basically, before I wiped it clean, I copied ALL the files from the /etc/mail directory to floppy with the intention of copying them back into the new /etc/mail directory after the OS was reinstalled. Well, I did just that... Now, when sendmail starts at boot, I get this:

Starting sendmail: Makefile:1: warning: NUL character seen; rest of line ignored
Makefile :1: *** missing seperator. Stop.
554 5.0.0 No local mailer defined
554 5.0.0 QueueDirectory (Q) option must be set

Starting sm-client: No local mailer defined
QueueDirectory (Q) option must be set

What does this mean? How can I fix it? Also, I did the same thing for the DNS & DHCP files in /etc, such as named.conf, dhcpd.conf, and so on. Also Samba. All of those services are starting and running fine, except although I am on the internet directly from the server (I am on it now to make this post), none of my Windows machines (which are the network clients) can access the internet. They are getting IP addresses, but not gateway information and such. Does anyone know why this may be?

cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward does show a value of 1, so I believe I am forwarding packets.

I am still somewhat of a :newbie: so please be gentle and feel free to treat me like a five year old! Thanks a million to anyone who can help!

Chris

Sorry, in other words, I did this:

Installed RH 8.0 with all the network services. They all started just fine at first boot.

I replaced all the files that RH created on its install with the files on floppies that I took from the machine before I wiped it. dhcpd.conf, named.conf, all the files in /etc/mail and /etc/samba were among the files replaced.

Sendmail started fine the first time I booted, but after I replaced all the files in /etc/mail with the files from the floppy, it started giving me the error shown above.

All other services are starting ok, but I have internet access ONLY from this server, not from the Windoze machines on the network.

Thanks, I hope that's a little more clear!

All I can say is ensure that the first line in the sendmail.mc specifies the OSTYPE(), and the specified MAILER() is listed. e.g. smtp.

This can be caused by a corrupt sendmail.cf file.

After making necessary changes to the sendmail.mc file use make, the sendmail.cf configuration file is created along with other files and directories. :confused:

That is what I can advise.
Good luck.

Yeah, pretty much the same thing as above. Instead of copying the entire /etc/mail directory back over, you could just copy the necessary files (sendmail.cf et al) and one at a time to see which is the culprit.

Cool