NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #20/NN_1992_20.iso/spool/comp/mail/misc/2964

Internet Message Format | 1992-09-09 | 25.7 KB

Xref: sparky comp.mail.misc:2964 comp.mail.uucp:1778 alt.sources:2024
Path: sparky!uunet!haven.umd.edu!ames!data.nas.nasa.gov!taligent!apple!veritas!tron
From: [e-mail] (Ronald S. Karr)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc,comp.mail.uucp,alt.sources
Subject: Smail release 3.1.27 is now available
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 9 Sep 92 07:11:07 GMT
Followup-To: comp.mail.misc
Organization: VERITAS Software Corp.
Lines: 576

Smail release 3.1.27 is now available.  This message lists the changes
in this release, and in release 3.1.26.  The last section in this
message lists the archive sites that you can use to get a copy of the
release.  Not all archive sites have acknowledged obtaining the new
release.

Release 3.1.26 was not announced on USENET, due to some mixups in
communication with some key archive sites.  Release 3.1.26 was a
very large release, including about 900K of diffs.  Due to the large
size, I am not making available a patch to move from the 3.1.25
release.  If you are currently running release 3.1.25 or earlier,
you will need to get a complete distribution from one of the archive
sites mentioned below.
--
    tron |-<=>-|        ARPAnet:  veritas![e-mail]
      [e-mail]        UUCPnet:  {apple,pyramid}!veritas!tron

CHANGES IN THE 3.1.27 RELEASE

Release 3.1.27 is a patch release to smail3.1.26.  This release is
primarily a bug fix, portability-enhancement release.  The total size
of the patch is larger than I expected it to be, based on the number
of bugs fixed, but the changes aren't very intrusive, so users with
custom enhancements should not have too many problems integrating them
into this release.

Also, at the time of the 3.1.27 release, I have a reasonably large
backlog of changes that I intend to include in a near-term release.
However, some of the fixes in this release are of sufficiently high
priority that I don't want to delay the release further to include any
more changes.

Changes in this release:

 *  A bug in the DNS lookup routines was fixed which was causing core
    dumps in dn_expand().

 *  The SHELL variable can now be set on the make command line.  This
    allows the use of alternate, /bin/sh-compatible shells.  Some
    systems (notably Ultrix and Xenix) have /bin/sh bugs which can be
    worked around by using a different shell.  I have also tried to
    reduce the complexity of some shell scripts, in hopes that more
    native shells will work correctly without needing to introduce
    workarounds.

 *  Add an AUTH_DOMAINS list to the EDITME file (alternately,
    auth_domains in the config file) for setting a list of domains for
    which your machine is authoritative.  This prevents the smarthost
    router from matching non-existing hosts in domains for which your
    host has complete routing information.  I included this in this
    release, despite the fact that it is an enhancement, because the
    change is small and because interactions with the smarthost router
    have caused significant confusion lately.  paths files can be used
    for similar purposes, but smail has come to be used more
    extensively on pure Internet machines, which often lack paths
    files.  Explaining why paths files must be used has become more
    trouble for me than it is worth.

 *  The visible_domains and more_hostnames config file variables can
    now be set with the names "domains" and "gateway_names" for
    compatibility with the EDITME file.  Again, explaining the
    differences here were becoming more trouble than the trouble of
    just making this change.

 *  Some problems with uses of the tolower() function have (I hope)
    been fixed.  Unfortunately (I guess), I don't have any non-POSIX
    systems any more, so I can't tell if my fixes are sufficient.

 *  Some changes to the motorolla delta system configuration file were
    contributed by Francesco Potorti` <[e-mail]>.

 *  Updates to the A/UX samples and conf/os files were added, as
    contributed by Bob Denny.

 *  A typo in the next2.0 configuration file was fixed.  Contributors
    working on NeXT systems have been driving me a bit nuts, given
    that their editor appears to add newlines and blank lines in the
    middle of patch files.  I usually have to apply their patch files
    by hand and I haven't always managed to compensate.

 *  A typo in the sun_os4 configuration file was fixed.  This one was
    purely my fault; I can't blame it on anyone else.

 *  Nigel Metheringham contributed conf/os/mips-bsd4.3.

 *  Some problems with timezones were (hopefully) corrected for NeXT
    machines.

 *  I completely rewrote conf/os/isc2.2.1.  I ripped out all of the
    POSIX features.  Attempts to use POSIX features ran into too many
    header file problems.  Also, what worked with the version of ISC
    that I have access to didn't work with isc3.0.  The new file
    should be sufficiently generic to work with most recent releases
    of Interactive.  I have NOT tested this with gcc.  If this
    configuration file doesn't work with gcc, then don't use gcc.

 *  For systems that have the dbm.h or ndbm.h file in an awkward
    location, the MISC_DEFINES variables DBM_INCLUDE and NDBM_INCLUDE
    can be set to indicate the include paths to use.  See
    conf/os/template for details.

 *  A size_t reference in string.c, which was causing problems
    compiling on a number of systems, was changed to an "int".

 *  The Date header now indicates (by default) the time that the spool
    file was created, rather than the time of message delivery.

 *  Some typos in the smail(5) man page, with respect to UK-only bind
    attributes, were fixed.  The attribute names should now appear
    when you format the man page.

 *  I changed some of the scripts in samples/bsmtp to work better in
    the face of queue directories that exceed ARGMAX.  Some alternate
    scripts were contributed which I may use instead, in a future
    release.

 *  I changed the sender_proto (the name supplied after the "with"
    keyword in Received lines) for batched-SMTP input to "bsmtp".
    Compressed, batched input is now "cbsmtp".

 *  Several bugs were fixed in the samples/generic/* file.  In
    particular, for directors a missing ':' was added and a comment in
    the "lists" entry describing sender_okay was corrected.  For
    transports, notify_comsat was added to the default "local"
    transport.

 *  The program invocation caused by invoking smail as "newaliases" or
    with the "-bi" option, was changed to reset the effective user and
    group IDs to the real user and group IDs.  The previous release
    did (correctly) reset the uid and gid if -oA was used to specify
    an alternate aliases file, but it probably allowed any user to
    rebuild the regular alias file.  I say probably, because a bug was
    causing the uid and gid to be set to random stack garbage, which
    must have been 0 on most systems that tried the feature.

 *  The accept() call on some systems (notably some SVR4 variants,
    though not the one I use) fail if descriptors 0 and 1 aren't in
    use.  Smail now opens /dev/null on descriptors 0 and 1, when
    operating as a daemon.

 *  The spool file format was changed (in an upward compatible, though
    not backward-compatible fashion) so that blank arguments do not
    screw up the argument list stored in spool files.  In earlier
    releases, a blank argument, such as -F "", could corrupt the spool
    file, since it used a blank line to separate an argument list from
    the header list.  I am rather surprised that this bug has managed
    to stay around so long.  It is an original design flaw.

 *  The HELO, RCPT TO, and MAIL FROM requests in SMTP now require a
    non-empty argument.  However, the argument to HELO is still not
    checked for validity.

 *  An extraneous utimbuf declaration was removed from src/sysdep.c
    that was causing difficulties with compilation on some systems.

 *  The files contrib/micnet/*.dif were removed.  These patch files
    were no longer relevent, since the files that they were relative
    to have changed substantially.

 *  Split changes into a separate file from the README file.  It is
    likely that the README file will split further in future releases.
    Some users have commented the the README file has become a bit
    unwieldy.

A short list of changes not included in 3.1.27, which will likely be
included in 3.1.28:

 *  Some authentication of the sending hostname, based on IP addresses
    versus the name supplied in the HELO line to SMTP.

 *  Some enhancements to the message-retry/message-timeout logic,
    including logic to remove stale files.  For now, the following
    shell command can be used periodically to remove stale files:

    find /usr/spool/smail/retry -type -f -mtime +7 -exec rm {} \;

    Removing files older than the message-retry interval is reasonably
    safe, since message-timeout logic is based on the modify time of a
    message spool file, not on retry files.

 *  A rerouter driver, submitted by Uwe Doering.  To remain
    consistent with previous statements, I must restate that I dislike
    hosts that do auto-rerouting.  However, this appears to be
    necessary on the European continent, given the rather arbitrary
    and beaurocratic nature of goings on there.

 *  Significant changes to the logging code, to make log entries much
    more readable, if less grep-able.  The changes were submitted by
    Uwe Doering.  It will be relatively trivial to convert log files
    for use with grep.  Perl scripts should have little problem with
    the new format, although be warned that all existing perl scripts
    will have to be rewritten for use with the next release.  The
    smaillog program will be modified to account for the new format,
    since it is included in the release.


CONTRIBUTORS TO RELEASE 3.1.27

Contributors to this release include Bob Denny, Uwe Doering, Greg Hackney,
Philip Hazel, Ron Heiby, Nigel Metheringham, Jim O'Connor, Chip Salzenberg,
Brian Taylor, Bill Trost, and Stephen J. Walick.


CHANGES IN THE 3.1.26 RELEASE

Release 3.1.26 is a patch release to smail3.1.25.  This release is
primarily a functionality enhancement release.  A number of bugs have
been fixes as well.

The total number of changes is quite large.  As a result, people with
customizations which were not included in 3.1.26 may have a fair amount
of work to do.

Important enhancements in this release:

 *  Greatly enhanced expansion strings, with conditionals and file
    lookups.  The original version of this code was written by
    Chip Salzenberg.

 *  Per-transport-configurable header insertion and removal based
    on the new expansion code.  In addition, the "From:" header can
    now be configured, including the ability to use a file to find
    a long form for local users (e.g, to get ronald.s.karr).  The
    configurable header insertion/removal support can be used to
    support the Content-Length field, by adding the following
    generic attributes to the local transport:

    remove_header="Content-Length",
    append_header="Content-Length: $body_size"

    Of some value with SVR4, you can also add a Content-Type
    header field, if no Content-Type field already exists, with:

    append_header="${if !header:Content-Type Content-Type: text}"

 *  The default Received: header now contains the "from" and "with"
    keywords, where such information is available.  Information is
    determined from the HELO line in SMTP, the From_ line in regular
    uucp mail, or it can be set using the -oMr and -oMs options, for
    compatibility with sendmail.

 *  Smail can now limit connections to the SMTP server, as long as
    a standalone smail SMTP daemon is used, rather than using inetd
    to start smtpd per connection attempt.  Two levels are provided:
    a maximum number of connections that yield immediate message
    delivery, and a maximum number of allowed connections.  This can
    greatly help the maximum load that smail places on a server,
    while allowing fast delivery if the server has light mail
    activity.  This code was contributed by Chip Salzenberg.

 *  Smail now tracks host accessibility for SMTP delivery.  If a host
    is down, then mail to that host will be deferred immediately
    (rather than waiting for a connection timeout) until a definable
    time period expires.  In addition, mail that is undeliverable for
    a definable time period will be bounced, rather than hanging around
    in the smail queues forever.  The parameters for retry times and
    message timeouts are configurable on a per-host or per-domain
    basis.  Several implementations of these capabilities were
    submitted, including implementations by Syd Weinstein and Dan Danz.
    I decided on a version by Chip Salzenberg, which included per-host
    configurability, and which (eventually) supported the host
    accessibility tracking.

 *  Interactive SMTP receive processes can now timeout.  By default,
    SMTP command receipt times out after 5 minutes, and receipt of a
    message after a DATA statement times out after 2 hours.  This was
    added after an urgent, but gentle, request of Heiko Schlichting,
    who had 100 receiver processes hanging around waiting forever for
    SMTP input.  The specific timeouts can be modified in the run-time
    config file by setting smtp_receive_command_timeout (default 5m)
    and smtp_receive_message_timeout (default 2h).

 *  Support was added for JANET reverse-order domain lookups in the
    bind router.  Contact Philip Hazel <[e-mail]> for
    complete support.  The smail3 release contains only that code
    that needs to be within the smail binary itself.

 *  Added support for NeXT netinfo databases (from Dan Danz).

 *  The DNS can now be queried within the tcpsmtp transport, without
    involving the bind router driver.  In previous releases, MX
    records could be used only if addresses were resolved by the
    bind router.  Now, under configuration control, the tcpsmtp
    transport driver can locate MX records itself, such as for
    mail routed by a local paths file or by a queryprogram router.
    This support was added, at my request, by Chip Salzenberg.

 *  Added a -oX flag to smail that sets the TCP port number used to
    listen for SMTP connections.  This is helpful in testing, because
    this (along with the "service" attribute to the tcpsmtp driver)
    can be used to setup a test network that operates independently
    of an existing SMTP network.  This can be used to make sure that
    smail works on your network before replacing an existing mailer.

 *  The smail installation process now attempts to preserve replaced
    binaries from your original operating system in .SAV files.  Thus,
    your existing /bin/rmail and /usr/lib/sendmail will not be
    removed, even if smail is reinstalled several times.  Previous
    releases would (sometimes) keep one backup version (with a .O
    suffix), which would then be removed on the next install.  The
    new process makes a .SAV backup file, if one does not exist
    already, allowing a one-time backup copy on the first installation
    of smail.  .SAV backup files are made only for files that are
    considered likely to provided in the base operating system.

 *  The uuwho utility now uses searches for domain information, if
    a full hostname match is not found.  For example, the command:

    uuwho mitsu.veritas.com

    will find the entry for .veritas.com, which does exist while
    no entry for mitsu.veritas.com exists.  This was added by
    Chip Salzenberg.

 *  By "popular demand" :include: in mailing list and alias files
    can now be followed by white-space.  This is for compatibility
    with sendmail.  Comments are NOT allowed after :include:.  For
    example, the following line:

    :include: /list-directory/mailing-list

    would previously have resulted in errors, but will now result
    in inclusion of addresses in the file /list-directory/mailing-list.

 *  The -bi option from sendmail is now supported, and newaliases is
    now yet another link to smail.  This support was added to allow
    existing YP makefiles (which call /usr/lib/sendmail to rebuild
    the YP mail.aliases dbm file) to use smail3 replacing sendmail.
    The original version of this enhancement was submitted by
    Bruce Jerrick.

 *  The sdbm library is now integrated in the smail release.  Systems
    that do not have a native ndbm library now use the sdbm functions
    to provide multiple DBM-like files.  Native dbm (not ndbm)
    libraries can be used only if they support the dbmclose() function.
    This was added by Chip Salzenberg, who was planning to use this
    in association with his host status monitoring code, but later
    realized the error of his ways.  But, the changes were left in
    because they seemed reasonable.

 *  The comsat daemon is now supported in the appendfile driver, and
    is enabled, by default, in the "local" transport.

 *  Mail which results in all recipients being eliminated (such as
    through duplicate elimination or sender elimination within a
    mailing list), will generate a bounce message.

Some other changes:

 *  The sender_okay flag (for configuring removal of the sender
    from aliasing and mailing list expansion) can now be configured
    from the EDITME file.

 *  Pathalias was updated to match the most recent release available
    on uunet.

 *  The compile process now echoes the results of variable substitition.
    The previous release would generate lines such as:

    . ./defs.sh; $CC $CFLAGS $INCLUDES -c foo.c

    now, compiles will generate something like:

    gcc -O -I/usr/include -c foo.c

    make -n will still yield annoyingly small amounts of real information.

 *  A sufficiently high debugging level will now enable debugging in
    the resolver library.

 *  Included some minor revisions to the bind router by Syd
    Weinstein, to fetch A records as a second pass after fetching
    MX records.  Apparently, there are differences in what different
    servers return in a request for MX records (some return A
    records, too, some don't).

 *  Sytems that require an alternate set of #include files to compile
    programs that use TCP/IP and sockets can define those #include
    files in the conf/os files or in the EDITME file.  See
    conf/os/template for details.

 *  Added some AUX support contributed by Robert B. Denny, which can
    be found in samples/AUX-support.  Most of the changes relate to
    printing documentation.  Some sample configuration files are
    also included.

 *  Smail now uses SO_REUSEADDR and some appropriate descriptor closes,
    to allow the smtp/queue-run daemon to be restarted cleanly even
    if a receiver process has been forked.  Previous releases could get
    errors in the bind() call indicating an address already in use.

 *  A new attribute was added to the gethostbyname router
    (only_local_domain) that disables matching of hosts outside of
    the local domain.  This was addedy by Dan Danz.

 *  Man pages were previously installed with mode 555.  They are now
    installed with mode 444.

 *  Added a NOTES directory containing messages that I have sent or
    received that illustrate various points of interest.

 *  Building of uuwho databases now differentiates between a #N line
    introducing a hostname, and a #NOTE, or #North America line
    introducing a random comment.  Recent map entries caused
    extra, bogus, entries to be added to uuwho databases.

 *  "A" records are now used in the order returned by DNS resolver
    lookups.  Previously releases would reverse the A records, due
    to the way these records were being added to a list, internally.
    The RFCs require that A records be used in order, since they may
    be sorted by network preference.

 *  The local-* transports for local-form delivery to remote hosts
    now does proper hop-count checking.  These transports use the
    new local_xform attribute which does local-form transformations
    without indicating that delivery is actually local.


Some bug fixes:

 *  Mail to systems with no MX records, but an A record, will now be
    handled correctly by the bind router.  I have regular posted a
    patch for this to various newsgroups and mailing lists, but did
    not include the fix in an earlier official patch release.

 *  Fixed some minor problems with bounce-message generation.  Bounce
    messages are generated by reinvoking smail and sending the
    bounce messages as a batched SMTP script.  The sender was
    specified as <>, in accordance with RFC822, which smail considered
    a remote address.  However, treating this as mail from a remote
    system was inappropriate, so an alternate sender token <+>, is
    now used to indicate a locally-generated bounce message.

 *  Nul-terminated some generated strings that were not consistently
    nul terminated.

 *  Fixed some problems resulting from routers that resolve to the
    local host, requiring further routing of the remainder address.

 *  Fixed some problems in the trusted-code logic that was running
    into problems with the SMTP interaction generated by MH.

 *  Errors in .forward files now generate bounces to real-<username>
    rather than to the postmaster.

 *  NEWS_SPOOL_DIR was not being stored in the defs.h file, yielding
    incorrect behavior from uuwho.

 *  Fixed some problems with interactions between the -t and -f options.

 *  Fixed some problems with varargs usage in log.c.

 *  Include <vfork.h> for Suns, to avoid a problem interacting with
    -O on Sun4's that could generate core dumps.

 *  Fixed some segmentaion violations caused by bogus @foo addresses.

 *  Fixed most (all?) places where smail was using a value immediately
    after it was freed.  This allows smail to work, unmodified, with
    the SVR3 -lmalloc library, or other versions of malloc that don't
    leave data from the last free unmodified.

 *  get_sender_addr(), which generates the sender address in various
    important contexts, was returning the same data between multiple
    calls, when it should have been returning different data.


CONTRIBUTORS TO RELEASE 3.1.26

This patch was made possible primarily through the work of Chip
Salzenberg, who contributed the first version of the enhanced string
expansion code (though I extended it rather a lot), the SMTP connection
limiting code, the reorganized bind code, plus the changes for the
retry file.  He also contributed a large number of minor enhancements
and bug fixes.

I don't have a good record of who else contributed code, fixes and
suggestions for this patch, but here is a partial list:
Tomas Ahl, Jack Bailey, Alan P Barrett, Mark Bixby, Randy Bush,
Dan Danz, Bob Denny, Jon Diekema, Michael Faurot, David J. Fiander,
Bill Hargen, Philip Hazel, Bill Heiser, Peter Honeyman, Bruce Jerrick,
Patrick Lee, Simon Leinen, Hillel Markowitz, Bill Masek, Jan-Piet Mens,
Les Mikesell, Lyndon Nerenberg, Jim O'Connor, Jim Pickering, Steve Piette,
Francesco Potorti`, Heiko Schlichting, David Schmidt, Monty Solomon,
Brian Taylor, Bill Trost, Gary S. Trujillo, Stephen J. Walick,
Lauren Weinstein, Syd Weinstein, and Andreas Wettengel.


HOW TO GET THIS RELEASE

The patch from 3.1.26 to release 3.1.27 is 81481 bytes (compressed).
If you cannot obtain the current patch file, or future patch files,
from one of the archive sites below, I will send it via E-mail.  I do
send the release itself via E-mail.  To obtain patches, send mail to
the address:

    [e-mail]

Smail-3.1.27 as a 956141 byte compressed tar file, or as a 81481 byte
compressed patch file is available from the following archive sites:

Server:        uunet, ftp.uu.net
Files:        /networking/mail/smail/smail-3.1.27.tar.Z
        /networking/mail/smail/smail.diff-3.1.26-3.1.27.Z
Location:    Falls Curch, Virginia, USA
Contact:    [e-mail]
Comments:    UUNET has a 900 number, for access at very reasonable cost
        from anywhere in the US.  The cost is 50 cents per minute,
        charged to your phone bill. The phone number is
        1-900-468-7727.  Login is "uucp" with no passwd. All uunet
        modems are Telebit modems, so they support most common US
        modem protocols.

    Canada:    [phone]
    Contact:    [e-mail]

    India:    [phone]
    Contact:    [e-mail]

Server:        FTP.FU-Berlin.DE [130.133.4.50]
Files:        pub/unix/mail/smail/smail-3.1.27.tar.Z
        pub/unix/mail/smail/smail.diff-3.1.26-3.1.27.Z
Location:    Berlin, Germany
Contact:    [e-mail]
Comment:    (From Vera Heinau): I wish to point out that the lines to
        Germany are sometimes (always ? ;-) very slow so people from
        overseas might prefer other servers.

Server:        ftp.msen.com
Files:        /pub/packages/smail-3.1.27.tar.Z
        /pub/packages/smail.diff-3.1.26-3.1.27.Z
Location:    Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
Contact:    [e-mail]

Server:        lth.se [130.235.16.3]
Files:        pub/mail/smail/smail-3.1.27.tar.Z
        pub/mail/smail/smail.diff-3.1.26-3.1.27.Z
Location:    Sweden
Contact:    Joergen Haegg <[e-mail]>


Archive sites that have release 3.1.26, but have not yet acknowledged
installing release 3.1.27:


Server:        stasys, stasys.sta.sub.org, sta.sub.org
Files:        /pub/src/smail.tar.Z
Location:    Southern Germany
Contact:    Frank Kaefer <[e-mail]>
Comments:    stasys allows anyone to dialin without change.  The phone
        number is [phone].  Login is "anonuucp" password is
        "anonuucp".  The modem accepts 1200 and 2400 baud, V.32, and
        PEP.

Server:        archive.EU.net, ftp.EU.net, mcsun.EU.net
Files:        ~/mail/smail/smail-3.1.26.tar.Z
Location:    Holland
Contact:    [e-mail]

Server:        ftp.nluug.nl, sun4nl.nluug.nl
Files:        ~/pub/mail/smail/smail-3.1.26.tar.Z
Location:    Holland
Contact:    [e-mail]

Server:        ftp.ee.und.ac.za
Files:        /pub/unix/smail3/smail-3.1.26.tar.Z
Location:    Durban, South Africa
Contact:    [e-mail]

Server:        compaq.com
Files:        /pub/smail-3.1.26.tar.Z
Location:    Houston, Texas, USA
Contact:    Greg Hackney <[e-mail]>
--
    tron |-<=>-|        ARPAnet:  veritas![e-mail]
      [e-mail]        UUCPnet:  {apple,pyramid}!veritas!tron