[geeks] disabling sendmail on NetBSD

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Thursday, February 14, 2002 at 03:22:22 (-0500), Joshua D Boyd wrote: ]
> Subject: [geeks] disabling sendmail on NetBSD
>
> I saw that this question was asked before in some google caches, but the 
> previous answer isn't working for me.
> 
> The previous answer said to remove sendmail from rc.conf.  Well, rc.conf
> doesn't make any references to sendmail, but it does refer to 
> /etc/defaults/rc.conf, which indicates that sendmail defaults to off, yet
> sendmail is spitting out errors on my console so it obviously ain't off.
> 
> Feb 14 03:22:55 twilight sendmail[5674]: My unqualified host name (twilight) unknown; sleeping for retry
> 
> That is what the errors read.  Not sure what it means, other than that sendmail
> is running, which is bad since this machine is supposed to be a firewall.

I think you're probably confusing "sendmail" with "sendmail -bd".

You can't turn off "sendmail".  /etc/rc.conf only controls "sendmail -bd".

You can find out whether "sendmail -bd" is really off or not by looking
at 'ps' or 'netstat -a', or trying to "telnet localhost 25", or all three.

Most modern Unix systems assume the ability to send mail, at least
locally, and on NetBSD that's done by default with "sendmail".  Sendmail
is complaining that it doesn't know what it's own hostname is so it
doesn't know how to deliver mail even locally.  Adding 'twilight' to
/etc/hosts might fix it -- I'm not much of a sendmail expert though.
(at 3:22 it's probably trying to deliver the /etc/daily report to root,
which hopefully you've aliased to be delivered to yourself -- never read
mail as root!)

Assuming you're running a 1.5.2 or close you could edit /etc/mailer.conf
and switch to using postfix (see mailer.conf(5)).  You turn off the
postfix SMTP daemon by editing /etc/postfix/master.cf (comment out the
smtp service), but if you use postfix you should always start its
default local daemons with "postfix=YES" in /etc/rc.conf.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods at acm.org>;  <g.a.woods at ieee.org>;  <woods at robohack.ca>
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