Managing Systems and Workgroups: A Guide for HP-UX System Administrators

Conﬁguring a System

Setting Up Mail Services

Chapter 3 277

Conﬁguring a System to Send Electronic Mail

Conﬁguring an HP-UX system to send e-mail is relatively simple. You

need to do two things:

1. Be sure that the executable ﬁle for the sendmail program,

/usr/sbin/sendmail, is on your system.

2. If you are using a Gateway Mail Hub topography you need to enable

site hiding for each of the client computers in your workgroup.

The following procedure enables site hiding, which means that

e-mail from users on client computers in your workgroup will appear

to the outside world as if it was sent from the hub computer. Replies

to such mail will be sent to the hub computer (unless a “Reply-To:”

header in the e-mail directs otherwise).

Using “Site Hiding”

Step 1. On each client computer in the workgroup (being served by a central

mail hub) edit the ﬁle /etc/rc.config.d/mailservs:

a. Set the environment variable SENDMAIL_SERVER to 0 indicating that

this computer is not the hub, and is not a standalone e-mail system.

The sendmail daemon will not be run on this computer:

SENDMAIL_SERVER=0

b. Set the environment variable SENDMAIL_SERVER_NAME to the

canonical name (ofﬁcial host name) of the computer that will be the

hub computer sending and receiving electronic mail on behalf of this

client computer. For example, if the hub computer for a client has as

an ofﬁcial host name, corpmail.corp.com, you would set the

variable as follows:

SENDMAIL_SERVER_NAME="corpmail.corp.com"

c. The environment variable SENDMAIL_FREEZE does not apply to clients

(which always freeze the sendmail conﬁguration ﬁle), but it is

probably good practice to set this variable to 1 to indicate to viewers

of the /etc/rc.config.d/mailservs ﬁle that the sendmail

conﬁguration ﬁle is being frozen for this client computer:

SENDMAIL_FREEZE=1

Step 2. Reboot the client computer to enable site hiding and freeze the sendmail

conﬁguration ﬁle.