Michael Madden wrote:
The FreeBSD Handbook seems incomplete and glosses over details: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/mail.html
That's because to do sendmail configuration justice, you'ld end up writing something like O'Reilly's Bat Book, and as Costales & Allman already did that there isn't much point in doing it again.
1.) How do I edit /etc/rc.conf to start sendmail at boot.
Just like any other daemon or service:
sendmail_enable="YES"
Well, actually, it's slightly more complicated than that: sendmail_enable="YES" starts various sendmail daemons in a configuration suitable for a mail server, ie. intended both to send and receive messages. See the rc.sendmail(8) man page for the gory details.
2.) Most of the configurations files seem pretty normal, but
sendmail.cf seems quite obtuse.
Yes. You should consider 'sendmail.cf' and 'submit.cf' as /compiled code/ -- you aren't expected to be able to understand them. What you, as the admin, should be working on are the `hostname`.mc and `hostname`.submit.mc files that are processed into sendmail.cf and submit.cf. The .mc files contain a load of macros intended for processing by m4(1) -- generally, they are a lot more humanly-readable than the resultant .cf files.
Look at /usr/share/sendmail/cf/README for a basic guide to what goes into a .mc file. The same information is available from the sendmail.org website, except with prettier markup. There's also the Sendmail Operations Guide in /usr/share/doc/smm/08.sendmailop. If you need anything more than that (and you probably will unless you're already halfway to sendmail guru-hood) then the Bat Book is your best bet.
I guess I'm looking for a document that would walk a newbie through setting up sendmail on FreeBSD without being too arcane or not detailed enough. My experience with some of the other Oreilly books leads me to believe they're pretty generic; I doubt I'd find information on how to setup sendmail for FreeBSD.
Actually, so long as you skip over all the stuff about how to compile sendmail, which 'make buildworld' takes care of for you on FreeBSD, and you absorb the information in rc.sendmail(8) and mailwrapper(8) which are the FreeBSD specific bits involved in starting up your MTA of choice on reboot, then all the rest -- how to write a sendmail.mc file etc. pretty much is just generic on FreeBSD.
Cheers,
Matthew
--
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 8 Dane Court Manor
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