Installing and Administering Internet Services

Chapter 2 65
Installing and Configuring Internet Services
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
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 Several messages that are of interest only when debugging.
16 Verbose information regarding the queue.
Table 2-1 sendmail Logging Levels