Re: [woody] sendmail bug?. Yes, it is

["nate" <debian-user@aphroland.org>]

Davi Leal said:


> * So, I execute "sendmailconfig" again:
>    Configure sendmail with the existing /etc/mail/sendmail.conf? [Y]
>    Reading configuration from /etc/mail/sendmail.conf.
>    Validating configuration.
>    Writing configuration to /etc/mail/sendmail.conf.
>    Writing /etc/cron.d/sendmail.
>    Configure sendmail with the existing /etc/mail/sendmail.mc? [Y] Reload
>    the running sendmail now with the new configuration? [Y] Reloading
>    sendmail ...
>
> * I execute "ps -el | grep sendmail" and it does not show anything!

> Installing the sendmail package from "testing" or from "unstable" solves
> the problem, that is to say, it gets the sendmail process running, but it
> shows the below message. Is that message important?.
>
>    Starting Mail Transport Agent: sendmailWarning: Cannot use
> HostStatusDirectory
>     = /var/lib/sendmail/host_status: No such file or directory
>    .

it's not critical, sendmail caches responses it recieves from
servers, so if a server is down it doesn't try to reconnect to
that same server for a set period of time. you can always make
the directory(be sure its writable by the sendmail program though).
about all that will happen is the server may slow down a bit if
you process a lot of email because if a remote server is down it will
keep trying to connect and time out ..

I had the same problem as you with sendmailconfig not working on
one system, even purging sendmail and rm -rf /etc/mail and reinstalling
didn't work, no matter what the config program would not generate
a .cf file for me. so i gave up and installed postfix(that was a while
ago, and since I have migrated much of my sendmail stuff to postfix+ldap)

nate