by |I've seen some cases where the desktop's sendmail daemon became
|unresponsive, so it stopped accepting inbound email, but email delivered
|by the mailserver was of course successful, so the intended recipient had
|didn't notice that only *some* of his email was being delivered, and the
|status of desktop sendmail daemon status is unmonitored by our IT
|organization.
|
|Aren't there risks to reliable service due to both (a) imperfect filelocking
|over automounted NFS, and (b) the added complexity of relying on more
|sendmail daemons than is necessary?
Yes.
A safer course of action would be to:
1. Make sure that the mail server has an up to date mail transfer and
local delivery agent, and is doing local delivery to its own disks
(not over NFS).
2. Make other computers get a sendmail with a "nullclient" configuration
(forward all mail to the mail server), and masquerading the From:
address to appear to be from the mail server. These sendmails can
run in queue-only mode (no -bd option), and can be setuid to some
user other than root (but that user must own the mail queue directory),
if you are concerned about security.
For some versions of SunOS/Solaris, a Sun patch (the sendmail patch
that is in the latest recommended patch bundle at sunsolve.sun.com)
will update the sendmail to 8.8.8+Sun with the m4-based configuration
scripts; otherwise, sendmail sources for 8.8 or 8.9 can be gotten from
http://www.sendmail.org . Use of the older SMI-8.6 or even older
5.0, 4.1, etc. versions of sendmail from Sun is probably not a good idea.
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