Sample sendmail Configurations: client.mc

client.mc
A client/server mail configuration is most often used when you have a cluster of machines which share all of their user information. Instead of each user having a seperate mailbox on each machine, you want them to have one mailbox for the entire cluster. You also don't want to have incoming mail deliverable on all of the machines, because then you have to deal with mailbox locking problems over NFS. So the best way to do it is with a mailhub configuration, where all the client machines forward local mail to the NFS server for delivery.

Here are the features of this configuration:

Here's what you'll need to do to use the client.mc file:

  1. Use the standalone.mc file on the server, as if it were a standalone machine.
  2. On the server, create a world-readable file called /etc/mail/local-host-names. It should contain the fully-qualified domain names of all of the client machines in it, one per line.
  3. In the client.mc file, uncomment the appropriate OSTYPE() macro for your platform. Also, change YOUR_SERVERNAME_HERE to the fully-qualified domain name of your server.
  4. Make any other necessary modifications before you generate the .cf files.
  5. Optionally, create the /etc/mail/access Access Control Database using makemap.
  6. Install procmail. Make sure it's configured and installed as a local MDA (it may need to be setuid).
  7. Create priority 0 MX DNS records for each client machine pointing to the server. Remove any other MX records that may exist for any of the client machines. Make sure there are no MX records for the server, other than an optional record pointing to itself.

Mark D. Roth <roth@feep.net>