From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Dec 5 7:25:10 2000 From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Dec 5 07:25:08 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-65-26-235-186.mmcable.com [65.26.235.186]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 912D937B401 for ; Tue, 5 Dec 2000 07:25:07 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 60123 invoked by uid 100); 5 Dec 2000 15:25:07 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <14893.2259.9779.958849@guru.mired.org> Date: Tue, 5 Dec 2000 09:25:07 -0600 (CST) To: Allan Dib Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Remote MTA In-Reply-To: <2777791@toto.iv> X-Mailer: VM 6.75 under 21.1 (patch 10) "Capitol Reef" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ X-Message: You should get a better mailer. Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Allan Dib types: > Does anyone know how to configure FreeBSD to use a MTA on a remote box. > i.e I want to use another SMTP server (either another box at my site or > my ISPs) and not sacrifice functionality by losing use of the "mail" > command or the daily "Charlie Root" reports. I don't think it should be > necessary to run sendmail on every FreeBSD box at our site...surely? No - you could use qmail or postfix. More seriously, what should all those automated scripts do when they are run and the SMTP server on the remote machine isn't reachable? If the process just hangs until that SMTP server comes up, you could wind up with a delayed chain reaction as other systems ran out of resources waiting on the server. They could just throw the messages away, but if that's acceptable, you might as well do that to begin with. The last option is to queue the messages to disk and retry later - which is part of the job that sendmail (or qmail, or postfix) handles. You can configure your chosen MTA as a "dumb" server that just blindly forwards everything it gets to the "smart" server. You should also be able to configure thing so you don't have to have an SMTP listener on the "dumb" systems. Once you set one up, you can just clone that to all the others. There may be a port designed to handle this case. The qmail docs also talked about it, and about using qmtp instead of smtp for mail deliver for better performance. http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Unix/FreeBSD consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message