Problem starting Sendmail on Solaris 9

UNIX Solaris
1

Hi,
I am getting problem in starting up Sendmail on solaris. When I do /etc/init.d/sendmail start
in Process list it shows sendmail process properly. But when I do portcheck by netstat it doesn't show Port 25/smtp.
What could be the problem ?

Thanks
NeeleshG

2

Have you tried connecting to the port with

# telnet localhost 25
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 hostname.domain.net ESMTP Sendmail 8.11.7p3+Sun/8.11.7; Sat, 11 Aug 2007 08:11:37 -0400 (EDT)
quit
221 2.0.0 hostname.domain.net closing connection
Connection closed by foreign host.

3

But port 25 is not getting opened. telnet to port 25 cannot be done.
thats prob...
thanks

4

Of course that is the problem; my posting was incomplete.

I suspect that sendmail is not running in daemon mode that is, it will send mail from the system but not receive it.

Check for an /etc/default/sendmail file which might look something like this:

MODE=
QUEUEINTERVAL="5m"

Also check the sendmail process with ps for arguments such as:

    root  461     1  0 09:40:06 ?        0:00 /usr/lib/sendmail -q5m

Let me know what you find. Sorry for any confusion.

5

Hey no sorry... no problem with that....

Below given output of ps -ef|grep sendmail

smmsp 10741 1 0 Aug 11 ? 0:00 /usr/lib/sendmail -Ac -q15m
root 10749 1 0 Aug 11 ? 0:00 /usr/lib/sendmail -q15m

But still when I run netstat -an|grep 25
It doesnt show any service..

I didnot find /etc/default/sendmail

Thanks
NeeleshG

6

Okay, so you're not running in daemon mode. Check /etc/init.d/sendmail and search for the variable "MODE". (Note that I'm running Solaris 8 at home and I'm not sure of, if any, differences).

In Solaris 8, the /etc/init.d/sendmail script will source /etc/default/sendmail setting various environment variables: MODE, QUEUEINTERVAL, and OPTIONS. These are used to call /usr/lib/sendmail. Verify that this is true for Solaris 9 (it should be). You see something like this in the init script:

if [ -f /etc/default/sendmail ]; then
. /etc/default/sendmail
fi

Then create /etc/default/sendmail as:

MODE="-bd"
QUEUEINTERVAL="15m"

Stop and start sendmail with the init script and you should see:

root 10123 1 0 Aug 12 ? 0:00 /usr/lib/sendmail -bd -q15m

Be prepared that this will open a whole can of worms with regard to email security. You current mode is sufficient -- with some tweaking of /etc/mail/sendmail.cf -- to route mail off of the system but it prevents email coming into or being routed by it, either intentionally or maliciously.

Good Luck!

7

Thanks Very much I started sendmail by following command:

/usr/lib/sendmail -bd -q15m

and it worked.

Thanks
NeeleshG