sendmail bug and work around

[Bryan Costales]

The sendmail supplied by Sun (4.1 and 4.1.1) has a bug which causes commas
to be included with user names when -oR routing is in effect.  This causes
problems on diskless clients that have /var/spool/mail nfs mounted.
sendmail recognizes that they are nfs mounted and automatically turns on
routing to the yp (NIS) server. In this mode, comma delimited lists of
recipients are sent with the comma attached. This can be demonstrated
thusly:

$ /usr/lib/sendmail -oRmailhost -v user1, user2
Trying 128.32.201.15...  connected.
220 mailhost Sendmail 4.1/SMI-4.0 ready at Fri, 18 Jan 91 16:43:58 PST
>>HELO myhost.my.domain
250 mailhost Hello myhost.my.domain, pleased to meet you
>>MAIL FROM:<myname>
250 <user1>... Sender ok
>>RCPT TO:<user1,>
550 <user1,>... User unknown

Notice that not only is the comma wrongly included, but sendmail begins to
send the message before it has collected one.

[[Ed's Note: I don't think the 550 <user1,>... User unknown message
indicates that sendmail is trying to send the message, it is simply
verifying the existance of the userid you are trying to send to. This is
standard behavior in my experience. -bdg]]

The workaround is to make sure that /var/spool/mail is a symbolic link on
diskless hosts, something like:

/var/spool/mail -> /n/mailhost/usr/share/mail

I have not heard back from Sun yet as to whether this is a known bug or
not.

Bryan Costales - Systems Manager - International Computer Science Institute
Internet:(work) costales at icsi.berkeley.edu     (home) bcx at lady.berkeley.edu