Solved: Request for sendmail assistance

[Manabu Tokunaga [c100]]

First, thank you very much for the overwhelming numbers of replies to my
initial posting.  I would like to thank you for the following experts who
took time and preparing the answers and mailed them to me.

	uunet!icarus.eng.ohio-state.edu!kaul (Rich Kaul)
	uunet!CC.MsState.Edu!fwp1
	uunet!spf.trw.com!jumper (Greg Jumper)
	uunet!ICSI.Berkeley.EDU!costales (Bryan Costales)
	uunet!rpal.rockwell.com!katz (Morry Katz)
	uunet!msri.org!david (David Mostardi)
	uunet!venus.phyast.pitt.edu!roberto (Roberto Gomez)
	uunet!wsrcc.com!wolfgang (Wolfgang S. Rupprecht)
	Prabal K. Acharyya <uunet!element.eng.ohio-state.edu!acharyya>
	uunet!gmv.es!jsanchez (Julio Sanchez)

Here is my original Posting:

>Problem:
>
>We have several diskless nodes connected to imatron.COM.  When outgoing
>mail goes out originating from any one of these nodes, RETURN-PATH of each
>outgoing mail contains the machine name of the originating machine.  For
>example, foobar at lazy.imatron.COM

>
>What I want to do:
>
>Can I reconfigure something so that all outgoing mail from our diskless
>nodes will have return path in the style of foobar at imatron.COM?  I tried
>to change Dj$w.$m to Dj$m in sendmail.cf of our subsidiary machines but
>doing so seems to open up infinite sockets and sendmail reports errors.

One of the answers correctly pointed out to me that under the Sun OS 4.1.x
this problem has been fixed.  That was correct, we just upgraded all of
our systems to Sun 4.1.1. and the problem has gone away.  It was just a
strange timing that I sent out the posting and the next time I noticed the
problem seemed to disappear all by itself.

But, of course, there must be a lot of sites for one reason or another
running the older versions of the O.S. who have the same problem as we
did.  Quite a few answers gave me how to "fix" the sendmail.cf on
subsidiary machines.  Most answers are variations of the following nature,
(as submitted by Bryan Costales of Berkeley) and I tried this particular
answer. It works fine.

Mether, P=[TCP], F=msDFMuCX, S=11, R=21, A=TCP $h
S11
R$*<@$+>$*		$@$1<@$2>$3			already ok
#R$+			$@$1<@$w>			tack on our hostname
R$+			$@$1<@foobar.com>		tack on our hostname
			     ^^^^^^^^^^^^ ---- Another answer that

Another answer appears to be more elegant solution was submitted by Rich
Kaul at Ohio State. I did not get a chance to test this.

# hiden host name
DAee.eng.ohio-state.edu
[... stuff deleted ...]
# A TCP/IP mailer
Mtcp,	P=[IPC], F=mDFMueXLC, S=17, R=27, A=IPC $h, E=\r\n

S17
[... stuff with defocusing and other adjustments deleted, send me mail
     if you want the complete sendmail.cf ... ]
# output local host as user at host.domain
R$-			$@$1<@$A>			user w/o host
R$+<@$w>		$@$1<@$A>			this host
R$+<@$=w>		$@$1<@$A>			or an alias
R$+<@$->		$:$1<@$[$2$]>			ask nameserver
R$+<@$w>		$@$1<@$A>			this host
R$+<@$->		$@$1<@$2.$D>			if nameserver fails
R$+<@$=w>		$@$1<@$A>			one last try

The S meaning apply this ruleset (17 in this example) to the sender
address field.  We use this as part of the sendmail.cf in another system
(which I'm not mailing to you from).

-----

Finally, for other tricks many sites do softlink /usr/spool/mail to the
mail host machine's file system via NFS.  We have been doing this too and
had very good results.

There are many other answers with slight variations within but with the
resource limitation on my side, I will stop now. Thank you once again for
answering my questions. I am really glad to know that world is listening
and that none of us is alone when it comes to Unix.

Manabu Tokunaga, CS Dept. UltraFast CT Development Group/ Imatron Inc.
389 Oyster Point Blvd., South San Francisco, California 94080
Phone: 415-583-9964, E-mail: uunet!imatron!manabu or manabu at imatron.COM