Re: [UUG/MLUG] Hacking sendmail for home system over dial-up

[Bryan Venable <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Fri, 8 Jan 1999, Jason McIntosh wrote:
[...]
> 1) Set this machine up for using mail services of that machine alone.
> I.E. being able to run pine on that machine and send and recieve email.

You need to run a mail transfer agent such as sendmail or qmail.  Most
(all?) distributions come with sendmail installed, with a basic
configuration.  If you're using Red Hat 4.2 or 5.x it should almost
certainly be installed and running (unless you specifically disabled it
during the installation).  You can see if sendmail is running by typing

ps auxfw | fgrep sendmail

If a sendmail process shows up, you should be able to send and receive mail
with Pine, assuming you have a static IP and hostname and the basic
configuration is adequate.  If sendmail isn't running, you should at least
have it installed, along with a basic configuration file.  Check for
/etc/sendmail.cf and /usr/lib/sendmail.  If they exist, try starting
sendmail with the command

/usr/lib/sendmail -bd -q15m

entered as root.  If the process shows up in the 'ps' output after you enter
that command, try sending mail.  It should work, but if it doesn't you'll
probably need to modify the sendmail configuration.  There are a number of
resources on the web, Usenet, e-mail lists and even books that could be
useful - http://www.sendmail.org/ is one starting point.  But if it comes to
it, and you can wait till the next MLUG meeting, I'm sure there'll be at
least one person willing to sit down with you before or after and help you
get it working.

> 2) Enable use of the webserver for any and all users of the machine.  I.E.
> if I added 5 users, how would I set up a mail account for each, home
> directory information, and web accounts for each?  Do I need a link in the
> /home/httpd/html directory where it seems such files are stored?  I.E.
> link a directory there to one in my home directory, such as /root/www

I'm assuming you have the shadow-utils package installed (if you're using
Red Hat 4.2 or 5.x, you do), in which case you can use the command

/usr/sbin/useradd username

to add a user with the login name 'username' to the system.  This creates
the home directory for that user (should be /home/username) and enables the
use of e-mail if you have sendmail running as described above.

Assuming you're using Apache as your web server, then
/home/username/public_html should map to
http://yourhostname.yourdomain.edu/~username/ and that URL should be
accessible as long as the permissions on the user's home directory and
public_html directory are right (chmod 711 ~ ~/public_html).

That should almost certainly work;  if it doesn't, there's an Apache
configuration file you'll need to edit, but by default it's set up so
~/public_html is the user's web directory.  BTW, ~ is the home directory of
whatever user is logged in, so if you use 'su' to become root then ~ refers
to /root, and if you then use 'su username' to become some other user it
refers to /home/username (or whatever that user's home directory is).

      Bryan Venable | Technical Coordinator | Virtual Online University
                http://www.spif.com/ | http://www.vousi.com/