[TUHS] pathalias and sendmail experience?

[Erik E. Fair]

I still have the sendmail.cf construction kit that I put together in the 1980s
and used into the 1990s at Apple and which I made available for FTP long ago
at SRI-NIC.ARPA - I was amused to find it was in use at Microsoft also ...

Would that help?

The key lines from those cf files appear to be:

# our pathalias database
Op/usr/lib/mail/paths

IIRC, sendmail had a generic ${lookup-key$} based on dbm(3) added to it. Before
ndbm(3) which could handle multiple databases in the same program, dbm(3)
could only handle one. Which explains these old production rules:

S8
# magic UUCP shit
R$*<@$-.UUCP>		$:${$2$}!$1		look up UUCP site in maps
R$+!%s!$*		$:$1!$2			remove %s database cruft
R$-.$+!$+		$@$3<@$1.$2>		do.main!user
R$-!$+			$@$2<@$1.UUCP>		host!user

Again, IIRC, the dance was process the UUCP maps through pathalias, feed that
to a generic dbm(3) database constructor program (dbm(1)?), and give the base
filename of the resulting dbm database to the "p" option of sendmail(8) in
the cf file, as above, which then would process queries with ${key$} and
substituting the result of the lookup.

My kit has sendmail.cf for pure Internet-only, pure UUCP-only, and gateways
like Apple was when I ran it. The Apple one also has some hysterical ... I
mean historical stuff with how we handled BITNET and an early gateway to
AppleLink through DASNET if anyone remembers that gross hack.

It was fun to revisit this and read comments. Let me know if you want the full
kit, and I'll put it up in my web server.

	Erik Fair
	formerly postmaster at apple.com
	formerly {ucbvax,ihnp4,decwrl,amd70,seismo,zehntel}!dual!fair