SUMMARY: Sun sendmail or Sendmail-8.8.2

From: Mark Fergusson (mferg@ddntl.didata.co.za)
Date: Mon Nov 18 1996 - 10:36:37 CST


Many Thanks to all who replied.

Kent Clarstroem and James Hsieh summed it up quite nicely.

Kent Clarstroem
>> I've recently been advised to upgrade sendmail to at least
>> sendmail-8.7.6.
>
>That is wise.
>
>> 1. What' the differences/benefits of useing this comparing to the
>> supplied version SMI-8.6 ? Should I upgrade ?
>
>Too many to say, actually. You have so many new things in Sendmail 8.8
>that it hardly can be described. Check out
>ftp://ftp.sendmail.org/ucb/sendmail/.
>
>It isn't really a question wheter or not you should upgrade, it is how
>soon! The 8.6-series are well known to have many securityholes, for
>example! And the .cf-files that come with the SMI is almost unusable, in
>my opinion!
>
>> 2. I have Sendmail-8.8.2. Are there any problems with useing this ?
>
>No, this is the latest and the best.
>
>> 3. What does Sun recommend ?
>
>I actually don't know that.. But since their security-patches are much
slower than the ones for the real Sendmail ....
>
James Hsieh
>
> 1. What' the differences/benefits of useing this comparing to the
> supplied version SMI-8.6 ? Should I upgrade ?

A fully patched Sun sendmail should I think be about the same as 8.7.6
from
a security standpoint. Hopefully, you are fully patched (if you're not,
you should).

SMI-8.6 is based on the Berkeley sendmail 8.6, but has been retrofitted
with
a lot of 8.7's features and security updates and also has some
additional
capabilities to integrate with NIS, I believe.

I chose to upgrade to 8.7.6 because experience has shown that if a
security
problem with sendmail is discovered, Eric Allman (the keeper of
sendmail) is
generally faster at responding with a patch than Sun is. Also, this
allows
just about completely identical sendmail.cf files across mixed SunOS
5.x,
SunOS 4.1.x, and other systems. If you have SunOS 4.1.x systems laying
around, sendmail-8.7.6 is the only way to go in my book.

If you choose to move to 8.7.6, you can pretty much continue to use your
exisiting Sun supplied sendmail.cf file (provided it's the one that came
with the "SMI-8.6" sendmail and not the older V5-based Sun sendmail).
There
are a couple of lines you need to remove which make NIS references that
sendmail 8.7.6 doesn't understand. If you can afford a little
experimentation
time, you might want to try your hand at generating a newer sendmail.cf
file
using the utilities provided with the sendmail source.

> 2. I have Sendmail-8.8.2. Are there any problems with useing this ?

No, and there are a number of new features I'd like to try to use.
However,
I'm waiting for people to flush out 8.8.2 a little more before I move to
it.

Thanks also to:
Claus Assmann
Rob Vahsen
Alfredo Sola
Rich Kulawiec
Dan Prits
and anyone I missed.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

----
 I've installed 8.8.2 and it's been running fine for over a week. There
was quite a bit of documentation/README's before I found the
nitty-gritty. 

There's an op.ps in the doc/op directory, but it doesn't give the full instructions to create the cf file.

There should be a brief set of instructions just to get it going. Here's my quick & dirty version, but DO read the op.ps and the README in the cf directory.

Go to the sendmail-8.8.2/cf/cf directory m4 ../m4/cf.m4 generic-solaris2.mc > sendmail.cf

in the sendmail-8.8.2/src directory, sh makesendmail sh make sendmail install

make sure the sendmail.cf file created above is in /etc/mail

Again read op.ps Hope this helps. Good Luck :)

============================================= Mark Fergusson Voice: (+27)-31-838333 Dimension Data Fax: (+27)-31-848525 PO Box 20713 Cellulal: 082-4465-118 Durban North Email: mfergusson@ddntl.didata.co.za 4016 South Africa Web: http://www.didata.co.za ============================================== >



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