Maintaining Mail Services 239 mented. All the tasks listed above should be simple to comprehend and per- form. Another hidden cost of Unix. Funny thing, the cost is even larger if your sysadmin can’t hack sendmail, because then your mail doesn’t work! Sounds like blackmail. Sendmail Made Simple Seminar This seminar is aimed at the system administrator who would like to understand how sendmail works and how to configure it for their environment. The topics of sendmail operation, how to read the sendmail.cf file, how to modify the send- mail.cf file, and how to debug the sendmail.cf file are cov- ered. A pair of simple sendmail.cf files for a network of clients with a single UUCP mail gateway are presented. The SunOS 4.1.1, ULTRIX 4.2, HP-UX 8.0, and AIX 3.1 send- mail.cf files are discussed. After this one day training seminar you will be able to: • Understand the operation of sendmail. • Understand how sendmail works with mail and SMTP and UUCP. • Understand the function and operation of sendmail.cf files. • Create custom sendmail rewriting rules to handle delivery to special addresses and mailers. • Set up a corporate electronic mail domain with departmental sub-domains. Set up gateways to the Internet mail network and other commercial electronic mail networks. • Debug mail addressing and delivery problems. • Debug sendmail.cf configuration files. • Understand the operation of vendor specific sendmail.cf files SunOS 4.1.2, DEC Ultrix 4.2, HP-UX 8.0, IBM AIX 3.1. FIGURE 3. Sendmail Seminar Internet Advertisement

240 System Administration Where Did I Go Wrong? Date: Thu, 20 Dec 90 18:45 CST From: Chris Garrigues 7thSon@slcs.slb.com To: UNIX-HATERS Subject: Support of Unix machines I was thinking the other day about how my life has changed since Lisp Machines were declared undesirable around here. Until two years ago, I was single-handedly supporting about 30 LispMs. I was doing both hardware and software support. I had time to hack for myself. I always got the daily paper read before I left in the afternoon, and often before lunch. I took long lunches and rarely stayed much after 5pm. I never stayed after 6pm. During that year and a half, I worked one (1) weekend. When I arrived, I thought the environment was a mess, so I put in that single weekend to fix the namespace (which lost things mysteriously) and moved things around. I reported bugs to Symbolics and when I wasn’t ignored, the fixes eventually got merged into the system. Then things changed. Now I’m one of four people supporting about 50 Suns. We get hardware support from Sun, so we’re only doing software. I also take care of our few remaining LispMs and our Cisco gateways, but they don’t require much care. We have an Auspex, but that’s just a Sun which was designed to be a server. I work late all the time. I work lots of weekends. I even sacrificed my entire Thanksgiv- ing weekend. Two years later, we’re still cleaning up the mess in the environment and it’s full of things that we don’t understand at all. There are multiple copies of identical data which we’ve been unable to merge (mostly lists of the hosts at our site). Buying the Auspex brought us from multiple single points of failure to one huge single point of failure. It’s better, but it seems that in my past, people fre- quently didn’t know that a server was down until it came back up. Even with this, when the mail server is down, “pwd” still fails and nobody, including root, can log in. Running multiple version of any software from the OS down is awkward at best, impossible at worst. New OS versions cause things to break due to shared libraries. I report bugs to Sun and when I’m not ignored, I’m told that that’s the way it’s supposed to work. Where did I go wrong?