Sendmail not receiving on FC2; other problems
 

As you can see from my postcount I'm very new here; what you can't see from that postcount is that I have very little experience with Linux.

But, I've been thrown into a position where I need to set up a mailserver on a Fedora Core 2 system I've put together. My initial decision was to go with sendmail, but I am regretting this decision more by the minute: I just cannot get it to work!

Attached is a copy of my sendmail.mc file: I hope you don't mind me just pasting it into the post. If you would recommend that I scrap sendmail and go with another program, I'm up for that too, as long as you can give me helpful instructions (there are very few great tutorials on the net for sendmail, qmail, postfix, etc. etc. that i have found).

My problem now: I can send mail from a command prompt. It shows that it was sent from "root@m2.schoffstall.com" - the current name of the mailserver. I'd rather it just show that it was sent from only schoffstall.com. Also, even though I can send mail, the machine will not receive: there is no message returned to the account that attempted to send a message to root@m2.schoffstall.com...but no message is received.

Any help you can offer would be great. Eventually the goal is to manage a small set of users on this sendmail machine and allow them to send/check their mail in evolution or eudora or outlook...or something similar.

Thanks.

Henry, :newbie:

Did you remember to rebuild the cf file after modifying the mc for your situation (and removing the line that makes it only listen on the loopback interface)? After rebuilding the cf did you restart sendmail? If both of those questions are yes, try telnetting to port 25 on your host from another machine and see if you can issue any sendmail commands.

Thank you for your response. I have rebuilt and restarted. How do I know if sendmail is using /etc/sendmail.cf or /etc/mail/sendmail.cf? I've had to rebuild into both, and doing it twice is somewhat redundant.

I'm going to try to telnet in a moment, but what is the line I should comment out for the loopback feature?

Thanks again.

I sent a message successfully to root@m2.schoffstall.com via telnet on a machine in the local network.

I guess this is a problem with connecting to machines outside the local network?

On Fedora I'm pretty sure it uses /etc/mail/sendmail.cf but if you're feeling paranoid you can always symlink /etc/sendmail.cf to that file. Given what you've said it does appear that the problem is from accessing the server from outside of your LAN. Can you try to telnet in from outside of the LAN to see what's happening? Do you have a router or firewall that may be dropping the traffic?

I do have the linux firewall set up, but it's set to accept mail (smtp) connections.

I will have to check on the routers we have, and I'll try to find a computer outside of this lan. Thanks again!

henryhund

This line should be left as default
LOCAL_DOMAIN(`schoffstall.com')dnl

Which is
LOCAL_DOMAIN(`localhost.localdomain')dnl

This line allows Sendmail to listen on all available interfaces so leave it exactly as is
dnl # DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Port=smtp,Addr=149.1.128.209, Name=MTA')dnl

I strongly recommend putting dnl in front of this line
dnl # FEATURE(`accept_unresolvable_domains')dnl

Add your domain name to etc/mail/local-host-names this will change your email address to
root@schoffstall.com add it as schoffstall.com

Have you set your /etc/hosts file correctly this is where Sendmail gets it's host name from

127.0.0.1 m2.schoffstall.com m2 localhost.localdomain localhost

I assume m2 is your machine name ?

Also etc/sysconfig/network should look like this
NETWORKING=yes
HOSTNAME=m2

You should be working in the /etc/mail/ directory so modify /etc/mail/sendmail.mc and use make -C /etc/mail in the etc/mail directory

If you modify /etc/hosts and /etc/sysconfig/network you will have to reboot to make the changes take effect

Pete

Wow, thank you for the very detailed reply, Pete.

I did exactly (or so I think exactly) as you said and I still cannot receive mail and my messages still seem to be sent from m2.schoffstall.com. I enclose an updated version of all modified files.

sendmail.mc
/etc/hosts
/etc/sysconfig/network
Oh and m2 is my machine name.

The way we have it set up now, there is already a windows 2003 server machine that uses schoffstall.com and accepts the mail for that domain. I've been under the impression that I could have two separate mailservers sharing one domain, though. Am I totally off base?

henryhund

Did you do this part ?
# local-host-names - include all aliases for your machine here.
schoffstall.com

If you modify this file then stop and start sendmail

If you are trying to send and receive mail to and from other machines on your internal LAN then you need to modify /etc/mail/access here's my file these are all my local machines

# by default we allow relaying from localhost...
localhost.localdomain RELAY
localhost RELAY
127.0.0.1 RELAY
192.168.0.4 RELAY
192.168.0.2 RELAY
192.168.0.7 RELAY
192.168.0.3 RELAY

If you modify this file you need to run 'make' in the /etc/mail directory to generate access.db, again restart Sendmail


As for sharing the domain to be honest I don't know the answer but if the DNS MX record for schoffstall.com points to the windows 2003 server machine then that's where the mail will go

You should be able to send mail but again this is only a guess, I'm not an expert just spent a lot of time setting up my own Sendmail server

Hope this helps

Pete