Basically, I wanted sendmail to take all inbound email and immediately relay it to another host. In my situation it makes sense because my servers have no direct access to the outside world (security thing). But in reality with the complexities involved in sending email these days, why bother setting up every host or every NAT to be capable of dependably delivering email.

So the solution is, setup one host that you know is a good mail host, and one host that you can monitor for throughput, then point all your other hosts at it for delivery. Piece of cake right? Odd that it took me 30 minutes and then a final trip to the sendmail documentation to find it.

In the end we’re talking about 1 line in your sendmail.mc (I’ve consistently found that most of life’s problems can be solved with 5 to 50 characters in the right text file).

At any rate, the directive you are looking for is:

define(`SMART_HOST', `smart.host.com')dnl

Just replace “smart.host.com” with the smtp server you intend to use as the relay.

For those of you who don’t use the sendmail.mc, you need to modify the DS variable in your sendmail.cf (but really, find something better to do with your time than edit that file).

For all you sendmail.mc users, once that line is in place, run a “make” in your /etc/mail directory and then restart sendmail.

Actually, I was using this mess of a line to test:

touch /tmp/mail.txt; /etc/init.d/sendmail restart ; mail -s "Test2" me@myemail.com < /tmp/mail.txt ; tail -f /var/log/maillog

You’ll come up in a tail of maillog and you should watch for the relay host accepting your message. If it doesn’t get delivered, it’s time to look at the relay server.

That is all, have fun!

At any rate, this sweet little 6000 series switch works fine connected to a PC, but through the Digi we get no love. What does Dell say? Dell says it should be exactly like all of our 5000 series switches and there should be no change in Digi pinouts, they also said, if it doesn’t work now, it never will. Whatever that means.. Well this of course creates a dilemma, we need to modify this thing and it is definitely going to drop the network.

So the short term solution is using a linux box that is connected to one of our entry points. Basically we just plugged the Dell console cable into the serial port of this server. After that you can just use screen from a terminal window to make it all go.

Once you have the Dell console cable connected, open a terminal window to the server that is hooked to the Dell(or whatever device). If you haven’t used sceen before, it’s really quite simple, basically, in your terminal window type the following command:

screen /dev/ttyS0 9600

This opens a console connection to the dell through your serial port at 9600 baud. Once you are in here, it’s life as normal, it’s getting out where you’ll need to know a little about screen.

The easiest way to bail out of this connection is the following sequence:
CTRL + A
K (SHIFT + K)

This will open a dialog at the bottom of the window asking if you are sure that you want to kill this window. Answer ‘y’ and you are back to your original terminal window.

Dat’s it.

1. Create an account on ustream.tv, you’re going to use your credentials to log into their server.
2. Download and install an IRC client.  In this example I’m going to be using pidgin as it’s installed by default in Ubuntu.  Versions for windoze and mac are available here.
3. Open up the app and click on the accounts menu, and click on manage accounts.
   
4. Click on “Add”.
5. For protocol, choose IRC, fill in your username and password (check the “remember password” option), then in the server box, add chat1.ustream.tv.
6. Save these settings and make sure to click “enabled”  next to it in the accounts window.  This will cause pidgin to create the connection to ustream.tv
7. Close the accounts window then click on the “Buddies” menu back on the Buddy list window.  Then click on “join a chat”.
8. In the channel window, type in the name of the room that you are currently in prefixed with a number sign “#”.

Once you do this a new window should pop open and you will be chatting on ustream.tv in your appropriate room without the hassle of their java web client.