chaotic intransient prose bursts: Sendmail in OS10.1.5 Sendmail in OS10.1.5



After installing the new OSX upgrade, 10.1.5, sendmail will fail to run. Apple updated sendmail to 8.12.2, but did not upgrade some sendmail related files, nor did it do the permissions properly on some directories. A manual update of /etc/mail/sendmail.cf will do the job (alternatively, you can follow directions in /etc/mail/README and regenerate sendmail.cf). Su to root, do a pico or vi on sendmail.cf and replace the line

V9/Berkeley

by

V10/Berkeley

and the line

DZ8.10.2

by

DZ8.12.2

Finally, replace every occurence of "A=IPC $h" by "A=TCP $h".

Save your changes and then do a:

sudo chgrp smmsp /var/spool/clientmqueue

and restart sendmail, by doing a 'kill HUP' on it's processID.

Why, you ask? Why? Well, I don't know why Apple forgot to do the permissions and be more verbose on the changes, but upgrading sendmail was necessary. Previously, sendmail ran as root, but it doesn't actually have to and constitutes a security hole. Version 8.12.2 fixes this by having sendmail run as a "submission agent" to add mail. For this purpose, 10.1.5 added a new user named "smmsp" to the passwd database, and created a directory for submitted messages called /var/spool/clientmqueue.