Fixing Sendmail after March 2003 Security Update

Mar 10, '03 09:47:00AM

Contributed by: scottboms

I've seen posts on a lot of different forums where people are stuck trying to fix Sendmail after the March 2003 security update which was suppose to resolve issues with Sendmail, not break things. Today I came across what I think is the answer and got things working again.

Here's what you might be getting if you check your mail.log file in /var/log/. This is a sample from my log file.

Mar  5 12:14:50 fusion sendmail[3869]: h25HEoCQ003869: to=sboms@schawk.com,
  ctladdr=root (0/0), delay=00:00:00, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=relay, pri=30036,
  relay=localhost [127.0.0.1], dsn=4.0.0, stat=Deferred: Connection refused by localhost

So how do you fix this you ask? Well, it should be quite simple. In my case, Apple didn't overwrite or change any of my config files (I had manually reconfigured Sendmail as per the instructions on the O'Reily site). What it seems is happening is that Sendmail is now using the submit.cf file for it's config file rather than sendmail.cf. Essentially, all I did was make a backup of the submit.cf file and copy my sendmail.cf file and rename it appropriately. Run these commands to accomplish this:

 % cd /etc/mail
 % cp submit.cf submit.cf.applesaved
 % cp sendmail.cf submit.cf
Now test out sending a message:
 % mail -v someone@somedomain.com
That's it. Sendmail should now be up and running again. I'm not sure of Apple's reasoning for making this change, but this fix seems to work. I've done this on two machines - a G4 tower and a Powerbook and they both worked fine now. Of couse, like anything, your mileage may vary but I'll be glad to help anyone who is stuck with this one.

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