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?