[BlueOnyx:21413] Sendmail Problems on Fresh 5209R Install

[Aaron Greenspan]

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to document some weird problems I had getting sendmail to work on my new 5209R install. Pretty much everything stemmed from problems in the /etc/mail/sendmail.mc configuration file, which I think is automatically generated when you change settings in the BlueOnyx server desktop.

First, sendmail would start but then fail and stop on its own by getting in its own way, claiming that something was using the socket it wanted on port 25. The error was:

NOQUEUE: SYSERR(root): opendaemonsocket: daemon MTA: cannot bind: Address already in use

I’d see 3-4 of these errors before the process would fail. I wasn’t using any other software on port 25, so sendmail had to be blocking itself—and indeed it was, due to the line

DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Port=smtp, Name=MTA’)

toward the bottom of the file, which conflicted with

DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Port=smtp,Addr=127.0.0.1, Name=MTA')dnl

on line 115. The comment right above that implies that the line only causes the service to listen on 127.0.0.1 port 25, but apparently that’s enough to cause serious problems if you put another Port=smtp reference in the same configuration file.

Then there was the error in /var/log/maillog...

SYSERR(root): hash map "Alias0": missing map file /etc/mail/aliases.db: No such file or directory

...due to the fact that line 34 read:

define(`ALIAS_FILE', `/etc/aliases')dnl

instead of

define(`ALIAS_FILE', `/etc/mail/aliases')dnl

I’m not sure why—the file referenced on the top line doesn’t exist. This was also causing messages to be queued, instead of sent.

Hope this helps someone...

Aaron