In my haste and sleepiness last evening I neglected to include part of the
'why' in my scenario...
The groupwise mail system is database driven and, being db driven, it gets
larger and slower the more things you put in it. It does cool things like
sharing duplicate messages so, if a piece of mail is sent to a system
distribution list, the message is create only once and it is shared, via
aliases, by all the users who receive it.
If you send a message to multiple users but do not use a system
distribution list, like is the case when sending a message with our
Majordomo lists, the message is duplicated for every user. On a small
system this isn't much to worry about but we are looking at a good amount
of mail traffic and we'd rather not have the bloat that we are going to
get when piping ALL traffic through to Majordomo....
That is /why/ we are trying to use Groupwise and Majordomo in
concert...
____________________________
Mike Neuharth
ADCS Technology Specialist
http://www.umn.edu/adcs
E-Mail : mjn@tc.umn.edu
Page Mail : 6123065932@messaging.sprintpcs.com
http://nifty.dsl.visi.com/
____________________________
The original message:
We are setting up a multi-node mail system in our shop and I am running
into a little problem and, although it might not be directly related to
majordomo(it is possible), I was looking for some other brains to bounce
the situation off of....
The setup is nearly mammoth, and possibly idiodic, please bear with me.
We are running two mail servers, one is a Novell Groupwise machine which
houses the vast majority of our users and the other is a Redhat Linux box
running Majordomo to handle the majority of our lists(many of which
contain users outside of our mail system; an important point because
to allow for mailing lists in Groupwise each additional username
outside the system must have an external object, essentially another
user, created for it...administrative nightmare...thus the majordomo
piece of the equation)...
So, we have two mail servers:
mail.mydomain.net (Novell Groupwise)
lists.mydomain.net (RedHat and Majordomo)
On the Redhat box I have an account for me, which receives all of the root
and postmaster mail and the username is mjn. My boss also has an account
on there just so he has access to Majordomo and his username is mbalak.
Sendmail on the Redhat box is set with
masquerade_as(mail.mydomain.net) and feature(`masquerade envelope'). The
majordomo.cf has the hostname of mail.mydomain.net but the errors address
is postmaster@lists.mydomain.net. Local mail works and I can send mail
from this host and the masquerading works fine.
We want to use the Novell machine as our main mail gateway because it
houses the majority of our users but, since Groupwise is geared more
towards small business workgroups(at most 100 users)...its MLM
capabilities are lacking; we are housing 300 or so users and 250 lists
which are comprised of local users and people outside of our
control)...basically it has a combination of gui sendmail aliases and
system wide address books. Not condusive to discussion lists or other
things of that nature.
We have created lists on majordomo(lists.mydomain.net) and created an
object in groupwise(mail.mydomain.net so that the list shows up in the
system address books and thus allows anyone on groupwise system to search
for and find the mailing lists. The object is basically a .forward file
which shoots any mail sent to that object over to the corresponding list
on lists.mydomain.net which in turn distributes the mail accordingly. We
are using a few lists like this without issue.
A problem arose today when we tried to configure something like this:
We created a distribution list in Groupwise which allows posts from
outside the system but contains users in the system and a pointer to a
majordomo list, called test1.
test1@mail.mydomain.net members are:
mjn@mail.mydomain.net
mbalak@mail.mydomain.net
test1-a(this is the .forward-like object pointing to
test1@lists.mydomain.net)
test1@lists.mydomain.net members are:
mjn@mail.mydomain.net
mbalak@mail.mydomain.net
So when sending email to test1@mail.mydomain.net we both expected to get
two copies of the same message delivered to our accounts on
mail.mydomain.net. What we got was something different...We did receive
two copies of the message but we received two of them every minute.
I checked the mqueue on the Redhat box and it was empty yet Majordomo,
every minute, received and delivered identical messages; so it didn't look
like a loop in majordomo. I know it was majordomo delivering because I
checked the logs and could see the message come through, that and the
subject_prefix was being added by resend.
The only way we found to break the loop was to remove the test1-a from the
groupwise system; remove the alias and the mail stops. Make sense?
Any ideas on where we might have gone wrong...other than trying to
impliment this system in the first place :P
It sounds less and less like a majordomo problem the more i think about it
but I want to clear my guilt before I go attacking my boss' system...
Hope it didn't hurt anyone's head.
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