Installing and Administering Internet Services

212 Chapter4
Installing and Administering sendmail
Troubleshooting sendmail
Understanding syslog Entries
sendmail logs the following:
• Failures beyond its control (SYSERR).
• Administrative activities (for example, rebuilding the aliases
database, and killing and restarting the daemon).
• Events associated with mail transactions.
Log entries marked SYSERR indicate either system failures or
configuration errors and may require the attention of the system
administrator.
Each system log entry for a mail transaction has a queue ID associated
with it. All log entries for the same input message have the same queue
ID. Log level is normally set to 10 in the configuration file. At this level,
the following information is logged for each delivery:
message-id= If a message had a Message ID header line whenit was
input to sendmail, this is logged. sendmail can also be
configured to add a Message ID header line if none is
present. This ID uniquely identifies a message and can
5 Messages being added to the queue in routine circumstances.
6 Unusual but benign incidents, such as trying to process a locked queue file.
9 Log internal queue ID to external message ID mappings. This can be useful for tracing
a message as it travels between several hosts.
10 The name of the mailer used, the host (if non-local), and the user name passed to the
mailer are logged. If the log level is 10 or higher, sendmail also reports this
information in -bv (verify) mode.
11 For successful deliveries to IPC mailers, the MX (mail exchanger) host delivered to (if
any) and the internet address used for the connection are logged.
12 All incoming and outgoing SMTP commands and their arguments are logged at
LOG_INFO.
13 Log bad user shells, world-writable files, and other questionable situations.
14-98 Debugging information. This information should be interpreted by your HP service
representative.
Table 4-6 sendmail Logging Levels