5 ms·

This is your sendmail therapy thread. Relate how sendmail scarred you here. :-)

by linsomniac 4y ago

_joel 4y ago
No, no, don't, I repressed those memories and don't want them to resurface! :D
thiagocsf 4y ago
Sendmail made me think everything in Unix was so scary and esoteric.
- jbverschoor 4y ago
  sendmail and bind :)
  - raffraffraff 4y ago
    Shudders. The LPIC exams I took back in 2005 made me think I would spend the next 20 years in vim manually configuring apache, sendmail, bind, openldap and a bunch of other stuff I haven't touched since the exam.
- doubled112 4y ago
  I never did get used to running make on my config files. Or the pain of somebody on the team routinely editing the output files without making the changes on the config files, and never knowing whether it'll work the same when you're done.
  - toast0 4y ago
    > I never did get used to running make on my config files. I worked in a very Make oriented place. If you need to do any processing on files, which not only includes compiling them, but also pushing them to other servers, and loading them into memory on those servers, that should be done with Make. Because Make makes things :) Now I'd rather write a Makefile than use whatever language's builder of the week. Make can make things, why do I need anything else?
neilv 4y ago
Circa 1990, our site (mostly a Sun shop) had to mess with our email setup, which included a UUCP link with HQ addressed by the unqualified hostname of the site's mail server, public bang paths to site servers (and percents), but also domain names (probably SMTP served from HQ and forwarded), and delivered to Unix workstation users by dropping into an mbox file in NFS automounted homedirs, and to non-engineering people running PC NFS and Eudora I don't know how... We did almost all sysadmin expertise in-house, but for this Sendmail, we brought in a consultant. It was a name I recognized from Usenet, and knowingly meeting a "famous" person was pretty new to me at the time. Turns out he wasn't a Unix graybeard (closer to my young skinny nerd age), and he was working on a Neuroscience PhD, while building/fixing everyone's Sendmail setups. I didn't know to ask him which discipline was more difficult.
- neilv 4y ago
  Once I started hosting my own personal email seriously, I think Exim was probably available. Even Exim config for a simple setup could get a bit tricky (e.g., I made it drop `Received` headers of outgoing email it was relaying for me), but nothing like Sendmail.
- gw98 4y ago
  I inherited one of these once. Someone had got half way through migrating it to Pegasus on NT and given up. Just as I got the whole damn thing in reasonable shape the bastards hired some Lotus consultants and replaced it with Lotus Notes.
hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
I remember I implemented some modifications my boss asked me and went on a business trip to Russia. It was early 2000s, no smartphones, and the only Internet on the phone was WAP. So my boss is calling me and telling me our mail server is sending out spam. Yes, I turned on open relay by accident... I run to the nearest Internet cafe and discovered they're blocking SSH ports. It took quite some time to unblock it, make the changes (it took less than a minute) and pray nobody intercepted my access data and make a mess before I get back. I've never felt so ashamed about my lack of professionalism in my entire life. I literally hated myself for being forced to use a public Internet cafe to configure my server.
- Someone 4y ago
  That’s why you should always have debug mode enabled. It would have allowed you to fix this issue by sending an email /s https://www.mit.edu/people/eichin/virus/strategies.html https://www.mit.edu/people/eichin/virus/strategies.html: “Debugging mode has many features, including the ability to send a mail message with a program as the recipient (i.e. the program would run, with all of its input coming from the body of the message).“ I don’t know why that page follows that with “This is inappropriate” /s
INTPenis 4y ago
All you really need to show is how Linus Åkesson made a Turtle animation[1] using Sendmail cf. That level of complexity should not exist in any configuration language. 1. https://www.linusakesson.net/programming/sendmail/index.php https://www.linusakesson.net/programming/sendmail/index.php
- hericium 4y ago
  Life is too short for software with its own, unique configuration language. I've spent months on learning Exim configuration gymnastics, trying to make it both efficient and useful and without breaking functionality used by a company/organization.
mkovach 4y ago
Worked at a place with OpenVMS and a UUCP setup. Yep, I've used mail11. I've use to setup UUCP mailers. I've hand configured sendmail with fingertips scarred from thumbing through the bat book. I've worked with sendmail to route mail to Novell NetMail! I use to be a Sendmail consultant. I've seen things you people won't believe. Open SMTP relays with zero firewall protection. I've watched people use sendmail to get root without a password. I've seen volumes of email lost in time, like bits into /dev/null. Time to patch.
- linsomniac 4y ago
  I ran UUCP well into the 2010s. Starting around 1999 I was running a small company and we all had laptops as our primary machines. Remember, back then Internet was fairly spotty: Still dial up, CDMA 9600bps cellular, Richochet, PCMCIA, BreezeNet... UUCP with qmail and later Postfix was a great way to shove e-mail over these really unreliable connections. The g protocol worked amazingly well over these unreliable connections because it could pick up where it left off, so as long as you could get a few packets through, eventually your (sometimes large) e-mail messages could make it through, even if they had the spend the night trying. The company kept that architecture well into the 2010s, even when we all had fairly speedy, reliable Internet connections, because it just worked really well. They eventually went to gmail years after I left.
  - mkovach 4y ago
    I will always have a fondness for UUCP. I eventually moved to qmail (a bit hacked up to handle for some unusual requirements) for all the UUCP related stuff. UUCP had it's issues, but it was (and still is) one of the best was to transfer stuff over really bad connections. We worked at a place where we had really remote locations and UUCP stuff worked without much work. Plus, I learned a ton in writing something to do reports and monitoring of the UUCP connections. Fun times, but I am still scarred Sendmail. Some wounds are pretty deep.
    - linsomniac 4y ago
      Back circa 1994, I was getting e-mail by dialing in to the Boulder Internet Coop via UUCP. They were really experienced Unix folks (Trent Hein, Evi Nemeth RIP), running Sun. At one point, the uucp queue got big enough (I believe from machines that were connecting infrequently or maybe not at all), that the directory holding all those files couldn't be scanned in less than the UUCP timeout. All the while I was paying long distance rates (remember those) to sit on the line idling. I had recommended they switch to using Taylor UUCP, because it splits the queue directory up into a hierarchy. They said Taylor wasn't mature enough, but I asked Ian Lance Taylor about it and he laughed and said "<THE major commercial UUCP provider> doesn't seem to agree." :-) I've always heard that Kermit has really great protocols for handling horribly, horribly bad modem connections. I had at times wondered if a kermit UUCP protocol would have been useful.
shellac 4y ago
The Bat book fell off a high shelf and killed my cat. Ok, I may be lying, but if the sheer mass of that book was more than sufficient to convince me to never try configuring sendmail.
tenebrisalietum 4y ago
I read a sendmail configuration file once.

This is your sendmail therapy thread. Relate how sendmail scarred you here. :-)

_joel 4y ago

No, no, don't, I repressed those memories and don't want them to resurface! :D

thiagocsf 4y ago

Sendmail made me think everything in Unix was so scary and esoteric.

jbverschoor 4y ago
sendmail and bind :)
- raffraffraff 4y ago
  Shudders. The LPIC exams I took back in 2005 made me think I would spend the next 20 years in vim manually configuring apache, sendmail, bind, openldap and a bunch of other stuff I haven't touched since the exam.
doubled112 4y ago
I never did get used to running make on my config files. Or the pain of somebody on the team routinely editing the output files without making the changes on the config files, and never knowing whether it'll work the same when you're done.
- toast0 4y ago
  > I never did get used to running make on my config files. I worked in a very Make oriented place. If you need to do any processing on files, which not only includes compiling them, but also pushing them to other servers, and loading them into memory on those servers, that should be done with Make. Because Make makes things :) Now I'd rather write a Makefile than use whatever language's builder of the week. Make can make things, why do I need anything else?

neilv 4y ago

Circa 1990, our site (mostly a Sun shop) had to mess with our email setup, which included a UUCP link with HQ addressed by the unqualified hostname of the site's mail server, public bang paths to site servers (and percents), but also domain names (probably SMTP served from HQ and forwarded), and delivered to Unix workstation users by dropping into an mbox file in NFS automounted homedirs, and to non-engineering people running PC NFS and Eudora I don't know how... We did almost all sysadmin expertise in-house, but for this Sendmail, we brought in a consultant. It was a name I recognized from Usenet, and knowingly meeting a "famous" person was pretty new to me at the time. Turns out he wasn't a Unix graybeard (closer to my young skinny nerd age), and he was working on a Neuroscience PhD, while building/fixing everyone's Sendmail setups. I didn't know to ask him which discipline was more difficult.

neilv 4y ago
Once I started hosting my own personal email seriously, I think Exim was probably available. Even Exim config for a simple setup could get a bit tricky (e.g., I made it drop `Received` headers of outgoing email it was relaying for me), but nothing like Sendmail.
gw98 4y ago
I inherited one of these once. Someone had got half way through migrating it to Pegasus on NT and given up. Just as I got the whole damn thing in reasonable shape the bastards hired some Lotus consultants and replaced it with Lotus Notes.

hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago

I remember I implemented some modifications my boss asked me and went on a business trip to Russia. It was early 2000s, no smartphones, and the only Internet on the phone was WAP. So my boss is calling me and telling me our mail server is sending out spam. Yes, I turned on open relay by accident... I run to the nearest Internet cafe and discovered they're blocking SSH ports. It took quite some time to unblock it, make the changes (it took less than a minute) and pray nobody intercepted my access data and make a mess before I get back. I've never felt so ashamed about my lack of professionalism in my entire life. I literally hated myself for being forced to use a public Internet cafe to configure my server.

Someone 4y ago
That’s why you should always have debug mode enabled. It would have allowed you to fix this issue by sending an email /s https://www.mit.edu/people/eichin/virus/strategies.html https://www.mit.edu/people/eichin/virus/strategies.html: “Debugging mode has many features, including the ability to send a mail message with a program as the recipient (i.e. the program would run, with all of its input coming from the body of the message).“ I don’t know why that page follows that with “This is inappropriate” /s

INTPenis 4y ago

All you really need to show is how Linus Åkesson made a Turtle animation[1] using Sendmail cf. That level of complexity should not exist in any configuration language. 1. https://www.linusakesson.net/programming/sendmail/index.php https://www.linusakesson.net/programming/sendmail/index.php

hericium 4y ago
Life is too short for software with its own, unique configuration language. I've spent months on learning Exim configuration gymnastics, trying to make it both efficient and useful and without breaking functionality used by a company/organization.

mkovach 4y ago

Worked at a place with OpenVMS and a UUCP setup. Yep, I've used mail11. I've use to setup UUCP mailers. I've hand configured sendmail with fingertips scarred from thumbing through the bat book. I've worked with sendmail to route mail to Novell NetMail! I use to be a Sendmail consultant. I've seen things you people won't believe. Open SMTP relays with zero firewall protection. I've watched people use sendmail to get root without a password. I've seen volumes of email lost in time, like bits into /dev/null. Time to patch.

linsomniac 4y ago
I ran UUCP well into the 2010s. Starting around 1999 I was running a small company and we all had laptops as our primary machines. Remember, back then Internet was fairly spotty: Still dial up, CDMA 9600bps cellular, Richochet, PCMCIA, BreezeNet... UUCP with qmail and later Postfix was a great way to shove e-mail over these really unreliable connections. The g protocol worked amazingly well over these unreliable connections because it could pick up where it left off, so as long as you could get a few packets through, eventually your (sometimes large) e-mail messages could make it through, even if they had the spend the night trying. The company kept that architecture well into the 2010s, even when we all had fairly speedy, reliable Internet connections, because it just worked really well. They eventually went to gmail years after I left.
- mkovach 4y ago
  I will always have a fondness for UUCP. I eventually moved to qmail (a bit hacked up to handle for some unusual requirements) for all the UUCP related stuff. UUCP had it's issues, but it was (and still is) one of the best was to transfer stuff over really bad connections. We worked at a place where we had really remote locations and UUCP stuff worked without much work. Plus, I learned a ton in writing something to do reports and monitoring of the UUCP connections. Fun times, but I am still scarred Sendmail. Some wounds are pretty deep.
  - linsomniac 4y ago
    Back circa 1994, I was getting e-mail by dialing in to the Boulder Internet Coop via UUCP. They were really experienced Unix folks (Trent Hein, Evi Nemeth RIP), running Sun. At one point, the uucp queue got big enough (I believe from machines that were connecting infrequently or maybe not at all), that the directory holding all those files couldn't be scanned in less than the UUCP timeout. All the while I was paying long distance rates (remember those) to sit on the line idling. I had recommended they switch to using Taylor UUCP, because it splits the queue directory up into a hierarchy. They said Taylor wasn't mature enough, but I asked Ian Lance Taylor about it and he laughed and said "<THE major commercial UUCP provider> doesn't seem to agree." :-) I've always heard that Kermit has really great protocols for handling horribly, horribly bad modem connections. I had at times wondered if a kermit UUCP protocol would have been useful.

shellac 4y ago

The Bat book fell off a high shelf and killed my cat. Ok, I may be lying, but if the sheer mass of that book was more than sufficient to convince me to never try configuring sendmail.

tenebrisalietum 4y ago

I read a sendmail configuration file once.