[SunHELP] How to check sendmail ?

[Martin Frost]

On Wed, 10 May 2006, Marek Grinberg wrote:

> In a Sun E250 running Solaris 5.6 I would like to check whether sendmail 
> is running OK.
> Pardon my ignorance but how do I do it ?

There are several things you can check. It depends a bit on what you mean
by "running OK". If you just want to check that something is listening for
SMTP, you can:

 $ telnet localhost 25

and see if you get a banner or a "Connection refused". If you want to check
that the Sendmail daemons are running, you can do:

 $ ps -ef | grep -i sendmail
 $ ps -ef | grep smmsp

and verify that you do indeed see a process listed for each. I don't know
what Sendmail version is included in 2.6 so you might not have the smmsp
one.

If you want to test that Sendmail is not only running but actually working
and configured properly, you will have to send a variety of test messages 
through the system and examine the logs.

If this is a machine you've recently been made responsible for and you
don't know the history of, be aware that many people replace Sendmail with
alternatives. You can tell whether this has happened by the banner when
you do the telnet above. On Solaris 2.6 I think Sendmail was included in
the core software packages. On later releases you can check for the
presence of the Sendmail packages with:

 $ pkginfo | grep SUNWsndm

This should show SUNWsndmr and SUNWsndmu packages, though even this is no
guarantee that someone hasn't simply removed or renamed the relevant files
when installing an alternative MTA.

Martin