Charles' Log: week of 8 January 2001

  1. January (Tuesday). 

    E-mail
    Last step in confirming a Danly order is to send out an e-mail to the customer... discovered that (a) net.data has a nice (I was shocked, really) @dtw_sendmail() function, and (b) that e-mail didn't work on the Sun.  More specifically, trying to send mail produced the error message: 

       dbm map "Alias0": unsafe map file /etc/mail/aliases
    A quick search via google for "unsafe map file" produced a wealth of information.  The specific problem was caused by an incorrect permission on /etc; it should be (I just made it) 755, owned by root.

    After that, trying to send mail caused an immediate bounce back to the sender, with the complaint that "mailhost.ibsentg.com" was not defined.  Considering that machine doesn't exist, not a surprise!  Somebody defined it as a "smart relay host" (DS command) in /etc/mail/sendmail.cf; I commented it out, and outgoing mail now works fine.

    Incoming mail still doesn't seem to be working.  I'll know more when I (eventually) get a bounce or other error msg back from the outside sender side.

  2. January (Wednesday). 
    Well, naturally the net.data @dtw_sendmail() function doesn't work; it returns an SMTP error of ".".  Very informative.

    However, I can send e-mail by writing a dtw_system %function that does a %EXEC{ ... %} on a shell script, which in turn can run mailx or sendmail... and that sends mail just fine.