*BSD News Article 97758


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From: Samath Wijesundera <samath@slt.lk>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Sendmail SMARTHOST
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 1997 13:51:33 +0600
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To: Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@portsoft.com>
CC: samath@slt.lk
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:43015

Ted ,

Ted I was trying to balance the load on the hosts here, and what I think
this is a practical. If the SmartHost cannot do this there should be
another mechanism with which I can fo it.

This is my background,
	1. I have a small internet pipe (64k)
	2. I have to deliver lot of mail and there are about 2000 dialup users
who forward there mail to the FreeBSD m/c to be delivered. (Using a mail
client such as Eudora)
	3. FreeBSD m/c has to send all the mail slowly to destinations (as the
internet pipe is small)
	4. sendmail have to keep lot of open processors to send them out. 
	5. These processes load the  FreeBSD m/c heavily

So I decided to quickly pass the mail to a nearby host from the FreeBSD
and allow that to deliver the mail. 

This works fine. But the moment the rely host stops FreeBSD cannot send
anything out ?  This is my situation !

Do you have a solution

- Samath
	

> 
> Yes - you run sendmail with a command line option telling it to process the
> queue and use a DIFFERENT sendmail.cf file that allows it to send directly.
> 
> The whole idea of a smart host is that the machine your on is either not
> continuously connected to the Internet, (behind a firewall, ppp connection,
> or whatever) or is too dumb to figure out how to lookup an IP number.
> FreeBSD doesen't fit in the second catagory, so it's kind of a misuse of
> the smart host feature if your continuously connected to the Internet to
> redirect all your outbound SMTP mail to someone else's mail server.  Why
> should their machine do all the work sending YOUR mail, are you too lazy to
> do it yourself? ;-)
> 
> If your in a situation where sometimes your connected, and sometimes not,
> such as a PPP connection, then you don't ever want your machine to attempt
> to deliver mail, because you won't know when it's connected or not.  In
> this case, you forward all outbound mail to a smart host.  When your not
> dialed up via PPP, mail to the smart host spools, then when you connect to
> the network you run sendmail -q or some such out of your ppp scripts after
> your connected to flush out all the spooled mail.