Installing and Administering Internet Services

Chapter 4 207

Installing and Administering sendmail

Troubleshooting sendmail

This section describes the following techniques for troubleshooting

sendmail:

• “Keeping the Aliases Database Up to Date” on page 207

• “Verifying Address Resolution and Aliasing” on page 208

• “Verifying Message Delivery” on page 208

• “Contacting the sendmail Daemon to Verify Connectivity” on page

209

• “Setting Your Domain Name” on page 210

• “Attempting to Start Multiple sendmail Daemons” on page 210

• “Conﬁguring and Reading the sendmail Log” on page 211

• “Printing and Reading the Mail Queue” on page 214

Almost all sendmail troubleshooting must be done as superuser.

Keeping the Aliases Database Up to Date

The aliases database must be rebuilt if changes have been made to the

aliases text ﬁle.

You must restart sendmail after you change the conﬁguration ﬁle or the

aliases database.

Issue the following commands, on a standalone system or on the mail

server, to rebuild the aliases database and restart sendmail:

/sbin/init.d/sendmail stop

/sbin/init.d/sendmail start

Updating Your NIS or NIS+ Aliases Database

If you are using NIS or NIS+ to manage your aliases database, see

Installing and Administering NFS Services.