3B2 mail broken?

[Bud Hovell @ Mtek]

In article <1991Feb6.021711.10141 at mccc.edu> pjh at mccc.edu (Pete Holsberg) writes:
<The 386 will send mail that's not addressed to a local user nor to a
<user on a listed site to the site indicated as "smart-host" in "paths,
<but the 3B2 just fails.

Hi, Pete!

We are running smail2.5 on our 3b2/400 rel 3.1, and 'smart-host' works fine.
However, a recent experience here may bear on your problem....

What we do here: we have one central host (3b2) where all maps are maintained
and pathalias and friends produce the 'paths' file; all other nodes (3b1s)
have local, hand-built 'paths' files with a path-reference to the central
host under the smart-host alias for the local (3b1) 'smail' to look up on.
We had no trouble with the 3b2, but the 3b1s (with the hand-built paths
files) weren't working AT ALL.

What I discovered was that the 'paths' file definition is *VERY* finicky: it
must be sorted in *absolute* alphabetical order (per 'sort'), and there must
be one - and only one - tab separating the machine-name from the path
definition, e.g.:

smart-host<tab>mtek!%s	100

Once the order of path entries was sorted, and tabs were singular, smart-
hosting by our leaf-nodes worked flawlessly. If either condition is not met,
it will assuredly fail, based on what we've seen.

Hope this helps.
____________
bud at mtek.com
"God is on our side." - Saddam Hussein
-- 
____________
bud at mtek.com
"The least government is the best government." - Jefferson