Re: sendmail on debian testing

On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 7:03 PM, Bob Proulx <bob@proulx.com> wrote:

Michael Grant wrote:
> I'm still searching for an answer to this.
> After upgrade from wheezy to testing, sendmail no longer starts.
> I see that the system is using systemd.
> ...

Some comments that I think are relevant...

Since it took a while for someone to respond to your question it tells
me that it is a combination of tools that not many people are using.
You are using sendmail in combination with systemd. That is an
unusual combination. If it were widely used then many people would
have been responding already. Frankly you might be one of the few
trailblazing that combination.

I do not mind trailblazing this to get this working for the greater good. It may be an upgrade issue or some other dependency, it would not surprise me in the least since this is a copy of an existing vm that I tried to upgrade.

It is true that fewer and fewer people are using sendmail these days, especially since it seems to have been orphaned. Sendmail may be old but it's incredibly reliable, well tested, and stable.

Trailblazers are great! They are the ones who make things happen.
However not everyone wants to be a trailblazer. There just isn't
enough time for everyone to do everything. You sound like a busy
person without the time to debug everything. Perhaps it would be good
to change to a more mainstream combination? If it were a mainstream
combination then the problem would almost certainly already have been
seen and fixed. Something with a lot of users and a lot of support.

Maybe I will one day.

In this case I would suggest that Sendmail is no longer the mainstream
mail transfer agent. Instead I suggest migrating to Postfix. (Or
Exim but I personally really prefer Postfix so will recommend
Postfix.) Postfix is well tested and very well supported. There has
been discussion of making Postfix the default mta on Debian. (But
that will never happen because Exim isn't bad just not as popular.)

I have tried postfix several times over the years. I was surprised that I was able to make seemingly innocent config mistakes in postfix and it would just drop mail into /dev/null. This is surprisingly difficult in sendmail as its failure mode is to reject or not accept the mail in this case.

Since you are using Sendmail I assume you have been using Sendmail
forever. You probably have multiple editions of the O'Reilly Sendmail
book on your bookshelf. You probably hate to take the time to migrate
a working configuration tuned over decades to something different. I
have been there and glance over at my two remaining editions of the
O'Reilly Sendmail books on my bookshelf. Let me say that moving to
Postfix was very easy. I don't even have one copy of the O'Reilly
Postfix book. It has an easy to understand design and the online
documentation is excellent. I have been where you are with Sendmail
and migrating to Postfix was a good decision for me. I suggest that
it would be for you too. YMMV.

Well, you know, I never bought that bat book either! But yes, you are right, I have been using Sendmail since perhaps it first appeared in BSD, I first encountered it in 1983 in BSD on the VAX 11/780, well before M4 and I used to write my own cf files back then too!