Mail configuration issues and revolunteering

[Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org>]

Hey,

Short summary: window is essentially unconfigured, so sends mail out with an
envelope-from origin of 'window.gnome.org'. It was (recently?) configured to
only accept connections from other GNOME machines (and was never configured
to accept mail for window.gnome.org anyway), so for all these reasons it was
unable to deliver mail to hosts doing sender verification checks, such as my
mailservers and more importantly, sourceforge listservers. D'oh! I've made
an immediate fix by adding masquerade_domains rules for the domains window
needs to send mail as (will be watching to make sure). While this fixes the
problem, it's really just treating a symptom rather than curing the patient.

Revolunteering: A number of times in the past, I have offered to configure,
fix and document the mail setup on the GNOME machines. I don't think I've
ever received clear encouragement to actually go and do it, but now we have
a new sysadmin team, and I'm sure you can all follow along. I'd start by:

 a) reanalysing mail requirements across the machines and applications
    currently in use

 b) aggressively configuring mail.gnome.org as the central mail hub for
    performance, security, reduction of crap email and minimisation of
    maintenance/configuration tasks

 c) minimising configuration on all other hosts by using mail.gnome.org as
    the central relay

 d) considering failover options once the configuration is sanitised

Thanks,

- Jeff

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OSCON 2005: August 1st-5th         http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2005/
 
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