Mailing List Archive: minimal config for [diskless] clients

hi -- in the THOUGHTS document, dan says the following in a paragraph
regarding the dangers of mounting the queue directory via NFS.
"Perhaps it is worth putting together a diskless-host qmail package
with just qmail-inject and an SMTP client in place of qmail-queue."
clearly, for many simple client machines, having a full qmail installed is
overkill, and as dan points out, it's actually risky on a diskless machine.
does anyone know of a minimal sendmail replacement that would forward all
mail to a smart host? no need for smtp service -- just /usr/lib/sendmail
would be sufficient. i haven't thought through this completely, but i'd
like something that would correctly handle administrative mail, like that
which cron sends to root, and let it be differentiable on the mailhub as
having been sent to "root@client" rather than "root@mailhub".

any pointers or ideas?

paul

---------------------
paul fox, pgf@foxharp.boston.ma.us (arlington, ma)

Paul Fox:
> clearly, for many simple client machines, having a full qmail installed is
> overkill, and as dan points out, it's actually risky on a diskless machine.
> does anyone know of a minimal sendmail replacement that would forward all
> mail to a smart host? no need for smtp service -- just /usr/lib/sendmail
> would be sufficient. i haven't thought through this completely, but i'd
> like something that would correctly handle administrative mail, like that
> which cron sends to root, and let it be differentiable on the mailhub as
> having been sent to "root@client" rather than "root@mailhub".

There's two pieces to this. qmail-inject, and smtpd. If you don't
need to implement mail queuing, smtpd is trivial -- just put in a tcp
proxy that forwards all port 25 traffic to the mail host.

The trick would be to get a qmail-inject rewrite that delivered to a
remote smtp rather than a local qmail-queue.

--
Raul