Sendmail 8.9.2 is a program for the delivering of email, generally across
homogenous TCP/IP networks. The implementation that is shipped with Solaris
is adequate but is generally lagging behind the latest available version and
thus could contain security holes which are widely known.
The installation of the sendmail is
controlled by the package subsystem, thus it is quite easy to install and
upgrade when new versions become available.
Make sure you use the GNU m4. This creates a generic file which you can modify.
I'll take this opportunity to indicate a complete lack of desire to configure
the few thousands of sendmail.cf
files people will email me asking to fix. Buy the O'Reilly Sendmail book.
If the sendmail.?? files don't exist
then use touch(1) to create them.
sendmail will complain to alert you
as to which ones it can't find.
Configuration Of The System
What we now need to do is convert the o.s. and filesystem to use the new
sendmail. There is a
/usr/local/etc/mail/convert_to_new_sendmail
script which will backup the orginal files, if needed, and make the links to
point to the new sendmail and new
tools. It will also move and link the
/etc/mail/aliases file to the new
location.
After you run the
convert_to_new_sendmail
script there will be a
original.email.files.<date>
in the /usr/local/etc/mail which
will contain all the original programs, stored with safe file attributes.
It's safe to run the
convert_to_new_sendmail script more
than once too.
To be fully complete you should edit the
/etc/rc2.d/S88sendmail startup
script to point to the new sendmail
binary, but this is not technically essential since the old binary is now a
soft-link to the new one, but it's bad practice to continue to call the old
location. ps(1) will show the old
one as running when the new binary is actually being executed.
The new sendmail requires more
stringent directory permissions, without which it complains a lot. You should
run these commands as root:
WARNING: writable directory /etc
WARNING: writable directory /usr/spool/mqueue
then you should also make the permissions on those directories more restrictive.
Alternatively you can specify more options to the
DontBlameSendmail option in the
/usr/local/etc/mail/sendmail.cf
file.