[rancid] Email notification problems.

Jethro R Binks jethro.binks at strath.ac.uk
Mon Nov 9 22:01:49 UTC 2015


I'll take a punt at this, as it also tickles vague memories.

So the email is going to the right place (via longdomain), but you are 
concerned about the From: address being qualified as shortdomain?  That's 
probably a consequence of the canonicalisation rules in Sendmail.  I can 
remember naff all about it these days, but my guess is rancid is sending 
as a bare rancid-switches and Sendmail is qualifying this bare address 
with the system hostname, which it thinks is rancid.shortdomain.com.

Does your system know its fully qualified hostname?  Is it the short form 
or the long form?  From what I remember on Solaris you had to poke around 
with /etc/hostname.* files, and so on.  You'll need to dig around in 
Sendmail references to rediscover exactly how Sendmail determines it.

You also might like to look at the MAILDOMAIN option in rancid.conf, where 
I think you can persuade rancid to explicitly qualify the sender address 
with a named domain:

# If your MTA configuration is broken or you want mail to be forwarded to a
# domain not the same the local one, define that domain here.  "@" must be
# included, as this is simply appended to the usual recipients.  It is NOT
# appended to recipients specified in rancid-run's -m option.
#MAILDOMAIN="example.com"; export MAILDOMAIN
MAILDOMAIN="@strath.ac.uk"; export MAILDOMAIN

Hope that helps,

Jethro.


On Mon, 9 Nov 2015, Alan McKinnon wrote:

> Chris,
> 
> Something about this rings familiar, but it was a long time ago and on
> Postfix, not Sendmail.
> 
> IIRC it was a combination of domain rewrite rules in Postfix's conf, and
> the local hostname was set wrong in /etc/hosts.
> 
> Anything relevant in your mail logs?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On 09/11/2015 23:37, Chris Davis wrote:
>
> > Allan.  Thanks for your response.  The alias file was indeed properly 
> > updated and the newaliases command was run.  The mail is being sent to 
> > the right place.  But what happens is that even though I send the 
> > message in aliases.db to username at longdomain.com, the From: field 
> > remains rancid-routers at rancid.shortdomain.com.  It's hard for me to 
> > know if this is a sending MTA issue or a receiving MTA issue.  It 
> > appears in the headers that the mail is being resent from the right 
> > username at longname.com domain, but the delivery address remains 
> > rancid-switches at rancid.shortname.com still.  I'm not sure of the 
> > impact of recompiling the package replacing shortname.com with the 
> > longname.com domain name.  I wonder if it would cause havoc in the CVS 
> > or other systems.  I'm guessing that I might be able to do some magic 
> > in the sendmail.cf file...  Just not sure where.  Make all delivery 
> > messages of shortname.com be rewritten with longname.com instead.
> > 
> > I'm wondering if when we remove the shortname domain, it will just 
> > deliver anyway since it isn't passing through the shortname's mxhost 
> > (which is what is going away).
> > 
> > Thanks for listening to rambling thoughts... Chris
> > 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Rancid-discuss [mailto:rancid-discuss-bounces at shrubbery.net] On Behalf Of Alan McKinnon
> > Sent: Friday, November 06, 2015 1:42 PM
> > To: rancid-discuss at shrubbery.net
> > Subject: Re: [rancid] Email notification problems.
> > 
> > On 05/11/2015 16:37, Chris Davis wrote:
> >> Feel like an idiot for not being able to find this, but I’m looking 
> >> for where a final address is picked up for email notifications.  We 
> >> have a very short domain name for our institution and the full one as well.
> >> Gone are the days when short and sweet were important.  We’re ending 
> >> the mail delivery service to that domain.  So, I have to swap out the 
> >> short, and put in the longer.  I checked everywhere I could think of, 
> >> and found the aliases file in /etc.  It seemed to have all the right 
> >> email address aliases so I updated the original email aliases with the 
> >> longer domain named email addresses in the destination section of the 
> >> alias.  I updated the aliases.db file without any problems.
> >>
> >>  
> >>
> >> But, as you can guess, the emails keep going to the original short 
> >> domain addresses.  At some point, we’re going to pull the plug on the 
> >> delivery.  Seems so bloody simple, but yet, I can’t seem to find the 
> >> problem.  Any help is appreciated.  Thanks.  I’m running 2.3.8.
> > 
> > 
> > Rancid mails the group name as a local recipient, so as you already figured out you need a local MTA with an /etc/aliases. This usually rewrites $rancid_group to $rancid_group at some-domain.com
> > 
> > If I read you correctly you did run newaliases and it succeeded?
> > 
> > At this point I'd be checking MAILPREFIX and ADMINMAILPREFIX in racnid.conf, then looking at my MTA logs to see what it's doing with rancid mail. These things are usually MTA problems, not rancid problems.
> > 
> > 
> > --
> > Alan McKinnon
> > alan.mckinnon at gmail.com
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Rancid-discuss mailing list
> > Rancid-discuss at shrubbery.net
> > http://www.shrubbery.net/mailman/listinfo/rancid-discuss
> > 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Alan McKinnon
> alan.mckinnon at gmail.com
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Rancid-discuss mailing list
> Rancid-discuss at shrubbery.net
> http://www.shrubbery.net/mailman/listinfo/rancid-discuss

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
Jethro R Binks, Network Manager,
Information Services Directorate, University Of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK

The University of Strathclyde is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, number SC015263.


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