On Tue, Jul 28, 2015 at 6:33 AM, Johnny Hughes <johnny at centos.org> wrote: > On 07/28/2015 04:09 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote: >> On Mon, Jul 27, 2015 at 7:52 PM, Fred Smith >> <fredex at fcshome.stoneham.ma.us> wrote: >>> On Mon, Jul 27, 2015 at 01:23:07PM -0700, Akemi Yagi wrote: >>>> On Mon, Jul 27, 2015 at 12:38 PM, Fred Smith >>>> <fredex at fcshome.stoneham.ma.us> wrote: >>>>> FYI, I ran all the (then current) updates from the CR repo this morning, >>>>> and found that it stepped on my sendmail.cf. (presumably the sendmail >>>>> rpm was the culprit.) >>>>> >>>>> I wouldn't think that was the desired beavhior, would you? I'd expect it >>>>> to drop either a rpm.old or rpm.new file instead. >>>>> >>>>> luckily, easy to fix once I figured out why incoming mail was busticated. >>>> >>>> If you look into the /etc/mail directory, don't you see >>>> sendmail.cf.bak? At least in my case, that file was created by >>>> sendmail* update. >>>> >>>> Akemi >>> >>> Yes, I do. >>> >>> Nevertheless, it seems kinda rude of it to break a working >>> configuration... >>> >>> But I'm no expert, what do I know? :) >> >> Sounds like you edited sendmail.cf directly. That's not the standard >> configuration file for local changes, those usually live in >> sendmail.mc and are processed with the m4 macro language. As I >> remember sendmail from.... oh, a very long time ago, you need to use >> the "sendmail.fc" or "frozen configuration" config file if you want to >> protect it from rebuilds based on sendmail.mc. >> >> Personally, I gave up on sendmail in favor of postfix a decade ago. >> The only reason I use anything other than postfix these days is if I >> want to have /etc/aliases and procmail read for local email addresses, >> and SMTP relay for 'name at host.com' email addresses. The only SMTP >> server I've seen that handles both at the same time is exim. > > I agree that is likely what happened, if the sendmail.mc file does not > match the sendmail.cf file, it backs up the cf file and creates a new > one from the cm file. > > That is the standard behavior, and this is not the first version where > that happens: > > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1196342 > > I personally don't like this method, but it is what postfix updates do, > and it is by design in RHEL. It's a necessity for any system where more sophisticated config files are generated from templates. A bit of history for sendmail helps, too: sendmail had large, thick books published to explain how to achieve subtle effects in sendmail.cf, and they were *nasty* to try to patch. They were as bad as raw iptables lists, and as fragile, and were nightmarish to debug while everyone is screaming that the email is broken. It's a very robust SMTP server, but was quite tricky for apprentice admins to handle until the sendmail.mc and m4 macros were developed.