HP-UX Mailing Services Administrator's Guide

Configuring and Administering Sendmail

Creating Sendmail Aliases

Chapter 2 65

Creating a Postmaster Alias

RFC 2822 requires that a postmaster alias be defined on every host. The

postmaster is the person in charge of handling problems with the mail

system on that host. The default aliases file supplied with the HP-UX

operating system designates the postmaster as root. You can change this

alias to the appropriate user for your system.

Verifying Your Sendmail Aliases

After you have created a Sendmail alias and regenerated the aliases

database, issue the following command to verify the validity of your

alias:

/usr/sbin/sendmail -bv -v

alias

,...

The -bv option causes Sendmail to verify the aliases without collecting

or sending any messages. Any errors in the specified aliases are logged to

standard output.

You can use the HP expand_alias utility to expand an alias or mailing

list as far as possible. For more information on the expand_alias utility,

type man 1M expand_alias at the HP-UX prompt.

Managing Sendmail Aliases with NIS or NIS+

You can manage the Sendmail aliases database through the Network

Information Service (NIS or NIS+), which is one of the NFS Services.

This service allows you to maintain an aliases database on one server

system. All other systems request alias information from the server. In

order to use NIS or NIS+, you must set up an NIS or NIS+ domain and

configure the machines in your network as NIS or NIS+ servers and

clients. For information about the NIS or NIS+ aliases database, see the

manual Installing and Administering NFS Services, at the URL

http://www.docs.hp.com/hpux/onlinedocs/B1031-90048/B1031-90

048.html.

When you configure NIS or NIS+ on your network, it manages your

Sendmail aliases by default, so you do not have to make any changes to

your NIS or NIS+ configuration.

Before you run the NIS ypinit script or the NIS+ nispopulate script,

ensure that the /etc/mail/aliases file on the NIS or NIS+ master

server contains all the Sendmail aliases that you want to make globally

available through NIS or NIS+.