Sendmail Newbie Question

[Matt Navarre]

On Thursday 19 February 2004 13:13, JJB wrote:
> You can not use your FBSD sendmail server to send email to the
> public internet because you do not have officially registered domain
> name.
Bullpuckey. It's actually fairly easy to set sendmail up relay mail through 
your ISP's smtp server. See this page of the handbook:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/smtp-dialup.html

Basically you need to set SMART_HOST and MASQUERADE_AS and rebuild sendmail.cf

You still need fetchmail to retrieve mail from your ISP's pop/imap server, but 
outgoing mail can now be sent the way pine or mutt expect. 

If you are trying to use the FreeBSD box as a server for other hosts on the 
network you will need to set up DNS for your network. Andrew Boothman posted 
an example back on Jan. 22 that has example BIND config files you can use as 
an example. 
freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=2352034+2356646+/usr/local/www/db/text/2004/freebsd-questions/20040125.freebsd-questions
You'll also need to install a mail server like imap-uw or qpopper so other 
hosts can retrieve mail from the FreeBSD box
.
> You can install fetchmail to retrieve your email from your ISP 
> and populate your gateway sendmail mail boxes. Then config your lan
> users mail clients to target your sendmail server to get their
> email. But really that is a lot of busy work unless you want to
> learn about how email works. What you should really do is config
> your lan users email clients to get their email directly from your
> ISP, side stepping sendmail completely.  You will only use sendmail
> to receive email msgs to root from the FBSD operating system. You
> know, when you log in an root, the you have mail mesg.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of dps
> Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2004 3:59 PM
> To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: Sendmail Newbie Question
>
> Hello~
>
> Excuse the extreme nature of my newbieness, I will try and do my
> best
> here. I am using  4.9-RELEASE FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE on i386.
> Basically, I
> am having trouble with sendmail. I know sendmail is running:
>
> $ ps -aux | grep sendmail
> root     97  0.0  0.8  3052 1552  ??  Ss   Tue10PM   0:07.85
> sendmail:
> accepting connections (sendmail)
> smmsp   100  0.0  0.8  2932 1436  ??  Is   Tue10PM   0:00.13
> sendmail:
> Queue runner at 00:30:00 for /var/spool/clientmqueue (sendmail)
>
> I can go into pine, and send mail to other users on the system. i.e.
> mail dan at localhost from root at localhost.  My problem is that I cannot
> send mail out to the Internet.  It appears it just goes into a black
> hole and its gone. I am not really too sure even how to monitor the
> sendmail log. I found some sendmail logs in /var/log, but when I
> tail
> them, they are either blank or jibberish.  My BSD server does not
> have a
> domain or a real IP. (for example the computer name is
> groovy.sockthief.com which cannot be resolved from the Internet, and
> the
> IP of the machine is 192.168.2.4). I have one of those cheap-o
> Linksys
> DHCP DSL/Cable routers that is acting as a network gateway.  I have
> read
> through the sendmail configuration section of the FreeBSD handbook,
> and
> it appears that everything should pretty much be working fine out of
> the
> box.  I guess my questions are:
>
> 1) How to I monitor the sendmail log
> 2) Do I need to do anything special with respect to DNS to get
> sendmail
> to be able to send outside of localhost
>
> Any help, guidance, de-dumbifying would be greatly appreciated.
> Thanks.
>
> ~Dan
>

-- 
mnavarre at cox.net 
it was a hard sell, since he's a database person, and as far as I've seen, 
once those database worms eat into your brain, it's hard to ever get anything 
practical done again. To a database person, every nail looks like a thumb. Or 
something like that. - jwz