HI,

I am trying to configure sendmail just for learning purpose a friend of mine told me a few steps for configuration which worked for him (he is using Linux 9.0 AS) I am trying the same thing on Linux 9.0 and having a problem on initial steps. I am listing the steps which i have followed so far.

I have added a host name in /etc/hosts (added rafid.com) file against my system's static IP (when i ping rafid.com i am getting reply)

I have made few changes in sendmail.mc which are listed below

changed LOCAL_DOMAIN('localhost,localdomain) to LOCAL_DOMAIN('rafid.com')
followed by
dnl # loopback
and also disabled
DEAMON_OPTIONS

I have replicated the changes made in sendmail.mc file to sendmail.cf file using following command

[/etc/mail]#m4 sendmail.mc sendmail.cf (while my pwd was ///etc/mail directory)

now when i try to do

#telnet rafid.com 25

it says connection refused

and according to my friend it shouldnt happen, I am stuck on this point. Please help me with this issue and let me know how should i resolve it.

Thank you

Rafid Haroon

Do you have a firewall enabled on the server? If so, are you allowing port 25 through the firewall?

Have you actually started the Sendmail service? There's no such thing as "Linux 9.0" but assuming you are using Red Hat 9 you could do "service sendmail start" and see if it starts up OK.

Hi

I disabled the Fire wall during installation and Yes sendmail service is running and i have also tried to telnet after shutting down and restarting the sendmail service again but so far no luck, and yes I am using RedHat 9 and by the way I am using VMWARE.

The issue was resolved there was problem with firewall any how now its working fine.

Now i need help on another thing i.e "dovecot" I couldnt find the package on my redhat 9's cds so i downloaded it from dovecot.org I have installed it according to the instructions given (using ./configure command) in the next step its mentioned that I should rename file using this command " #mv /usr/local/etc/dovecot-example.conf /usr/local/etc/dovecot.conf"

but the thing is that there arent any files copied in /usr/local/etc folder installation appears to be completed i.e it didnt ended in any error but when i do a query to check if package has been installed or not using " #rpm -q dovecot" it ends in failure, so please let me know what am I doing wrong here

The RPM database doesn't magically know about stuff you compile from source. To find where it put the example dovecot.conf do updatedb and then locate dovecot-example.conf.

If you're going to be running a server, I seriously recommend running something other than Red Hat 9. Red Hat 9 is about 3 years old and unsupported. I would advise you to move to the latest CentOS release (4.4 as of this writing). CentOS is a free rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so it will retain the Red Hat "look and feel". There are other choices too, but running obsoleted OSes on a server is generally not a good idea unless you have no choioce for compatibility reasons. Also, CentOS comes with a prepackaged RPM fopr dovecot, so it should be much easier to set up.

Thanks for your suggestion what about Redhat 9 A.S enterprise Edition can i use that or Fedora Core 5 as a server, for the time being I have only these two options which one do you recommend.

To be honest neither is a teribly wonderful choice IMO (RH9 is old and heading out of support and FC5 is rather bleeding edge). You can't download and burn CentOS? I guess if I had to choose I'd go with FC5 since at least there's a few months of support left (as FC6 is just coming out now) plus whatever support the Fedora Legacy project would give.

If for some reason your only choices are between Redhat 9 and Fedora 5, you should go with Fedora 5.

What do you say about Redhat AS server.

this help is very useful. Could u plz help me how to check tht sendmail is propely working or not.

One more thing can u help me reg relay server. i am using rhel 4 WS

What do you want to check is running Ok or not the configuration of sendmail or sendmail service itself ?

What do you want to check is running Ok or not the configuration of sendmail or sendmail service itself ?

Ya i want to check tht sendmail is working properly?

The problem i am facing is tht when ever i send a mail to any acc, log shows tht mail is succesfully delivered but i never rec any mail.

Can you post the relevant lines of your maillog. If the message is received by the remote site, but never gets delivered then it's likely being eaten by a spam filter or similar. Many ISPs block all mail from residential IP address because most mail from those addresses comes from zombie Windows PCs infected with the virus-of-the-week. If you're using your home connection to send mail, it's likely some ISPs will block you. You can avoid this by relaying through your ISPs mail server using the SMART_HOST directive in sendmail.mc (remember to regenrate sendmail.cf from sendmail.mc).

If this is a local issue, something must be broken in local delivery. Please send usthe relevant section of your logs so we can see what is happening.