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some answers to questions?
Authored by: shen on Aug 28, '02 02:55:07AM

"if you dont have your own private networking going on, and you are plugged into the modem directly, im not sure how all this bind/named stuff would work. getting that to work would probably be a real trick. i would invest in the linksys (or something like it). its safer for your computer, and it makes adding more machines easier."

Short answer: it apparently doesn't.

RGould, I can't help but get the feeling that your base configuration is somehow quite different from mine, if what you described has actually given you a functional sendmail. I have tried a dozen different ways to get sendmail running in 10.1.5 and 10.2 and none of them work. All I want is to be able to get syslog reports emailed to me instead of /dev/null. I have managed to get the daemon running and it will even accept connections on localhost port 25, but after that it always fails to accept a message. Very frustrating, and I dare say Apple is getting far too much credit for making something easy that turns out to be really quite difficult for some. I'm a pretty old hand with BSD operating systems, and Apple's netinfo and SystemStarter pretty much makes everything I think I know about configuring mail transport agents worthless in Mac OS X. I just hope someone comes up with a safe and sane way to do what should be relatively simple task. Why there isn't a checkbox in Sharing to enable sendmail is beyond me. Maybe I should just buck the system and install qmail or postfix instead.



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some answers to questions?
Authored by: rgould on Aug 28, '02 10:03:52AM
did you make sure to:
chmod g-w /
to make sendmail happy? modifying the /etc/mail/sendmail.cf file and fiddling with the
O UnsafeGroupWrites=False
line didnt seem to help me. if you did do the chmod trick, you are going to have to make sure to do it again after every install with a apple package you do. apparently the package installer resets that permission. a good way to figure out why your sendmail is not happy is to check in /var/log/mail.log. to troubleshoot, i open up a terminal and type
tail -F /var/log/mail.log
this will show you what gets written to the file in real-time so long as you keep the tail process running. now send some mail and see what it is complaining about. or, research what the error is that the server is giving you back. i use http://groups.google.com/ as for my installation vs everyone elses installation, i did a clean install of 10.2. if you did an install over a 10.1 things could be all outta whack.

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some answers to questions?
Authored by: shen on Aug 28, '02 01:31:16PM

I did all of the perms fixes, had a clean install of 10.2. I was already tailing mail.log and the error message returned by sendmail is so non-specific I can't find any further info on it.

Thanks for posting... I've complained to Apple about this one, because it is just unreasonable to ship a Unix distribution (which Mac OS X undeniably is) with broken sendmail and provide no safe, sane, or standard procedure to enable it.



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