Confusion with Fast & Slow sendmail daemons
IN the 3rd edition of the O'Reilly sendmail (bat) book, Section 6.2.1,
entitled "Run Separate Fast and Slow Sendmail Daemons, the author
details having two sendmail.cf files (and daemon instances):
1) one with timeouts that make it slow-tolerant (pretty much the
default) for handling resends from the queue
2) another with timeouts that make it intolerant of slowness.
The point is that when the sendmail daemon first tries to deliver mail,
the daemon (type #2) doesn't hang up waiting for a slow recipeint, but
rather throws the mail into the queue...the sendmail daemon for which
is type #1 ;and will try much more patiently.
So the mail that can go, goes immediately...and the slow stuff, gets
sidestepped, goes into the queue and is dealt with later by the #1
instance.
I've used this, seemingly successfully, for a few years, but now I
realize I didn't fully understand things. It appears the type #2
instance, which has the invocation flag -bd, not only sends mail, but
also receives it (it's the instance that shows up in the ps listing as
"sendmail accepting connections".
The problem is that, while I want to make the #2 daemon instance delay
intolerant when SENDING mail, it should be delay tolerant when
RECEIVING mail (that it gets listening on port 25).
I am running AIX V5.3....my sendmail (please just accept that I want
IBM to deal with creating the binary) is at V8.11....though I could
uplevel it to V8.13.
Would there be someone that might explain to me:
a) if, with one of these two sendmail levels, there was some way to
split the sendmail into two daemons, one receiving mail, the other
sending it, each with its own sendmail.cf file and Timeouts.
b) alternately, is it possible to divide the timeouts into receiving
and sending timeouts, and adjust each accordingly. Which are which?
My thanks for whatever patient, knoweldgeable soul might be kind enough
to lend me a hand
|