SUMMARY: Sendmail 8.8.7 vs. NIS on Solaris

Patrick L. Nolan (pln@egret1.Stanford.EDU)
Wed, 22 Oct 1997 10:31:54 -0700 (PDT)

Sendmail 8.8.7 wasn't cooperating with NIS because it wanted to use the new
Berkeley database format, which NIS doesn't understand. My original message
is at the bottom.

Thanks to the following for suggestions:
baumann@optivus.com
chris@cellone-sf.com
rali@meitca.com
rsk@rsk.itw.com
rick@lunger.llnl.gov
zdjod@lif.de
jonb@visi.com
jim@telecnnct.com
chuck@npiww.com

The solution I chose was to compile sendmail without the NEWDB option.
This wasn't easy because I hadn't been compiling it at all. At Stanford we
have some helpful people who compile lots of free software for the whole
campus. I had been just using their binaries. After a few false starts I
was able to make my own.

Others suggested using makemap, a utility that comes as part of the sendmail
package. I found this hard to compile in isolation. When I got the entire
sendmail source code, I decided to compile sendmail itself and solve the
whole problem at the root.

Original message:
>
> I'm converting a group of Sparcs from SunOS 4.1.x to Solaris 2.5.1.
> Today I tried to move the NIS master to one of the Solaris machines and
> got in some trouble with sendmail. I'm using sendmail 8.8.7, which
> uses a more modern (?) database system than Sun's sendmail. In
> particular, it converts the aliases file to aliases.db, instead of the
> old aliases.dir and aliases.pag.
>
> Unfortunately NIS (NSkit 1.2) expects the .dir and .pag files. When it
> tries to build its maps, the new sendmail won't cooperate. Thus there's
> no mail.aliases map in the domain. When I try to send mail, sendmail
> chokes because it can't bind to that map.
>
> I can get around this by changing this line in nsswitch.conf:
> aliases: files nis
> to
> aliases: files
>
> This isn't really desirable because I have to maintain a current copy of
> the aliases file on each machine. Is there some way to build a proper NIS
> map with sendmail 8.8.7?