Questions and Answers

Amy Rich

Q. I’m running MIMEDefang with SpamAssassin and sendmail 8.12.6. I’ve noticed that there are always a number of MIMEDefang processes running, generally one for each sendmail process. Each of these sendmail processes was handling a piece of email from a domain listed as a spammer in /etc/mail/access. Shouldn’t these connections have been rejected altogether instead of firing off a MIMEDefang process? If it’s not this way by default, can I change it so that so many processes don’t get spawned?

A. Depending on when the check occurs, your MIMEDefang milter might still be invoked at connection time. If you blacklist a sender, for example, the milter is still invoked at connection and HELO time. Sendmail doesn’t know to reject the sender until “MAIL FROM:”. These processes shouldn’t be taking up much in the way of resources beyond those needed to spawn the process itself. If your machine is being swamped by this, you may want to take a look at the mimedefang-multiplexor. The multiplexor only spawns a new process when it actually has data to pass to it.

Q. We want users on our Solaris 8 machine, sheridan, to be able to chown their files to other users on the same machine. We ran into a problem doing this, and found information saying that we needed to set rstchown to 0 in /etc/system. We did this on sheridan, and things seemed to be working great on the filesystems that are automounted locally. However, we’re having issues again trying to make this work on files that are automounted from another Solaris 8 machine, sinclair. We’ve made sure that sinclair is exporting this filesystem rw,suid and that sheridan is mounting it as such. We tested the local and NFS-mounted files with the exact same users, groups, and file and directory permissions.