[altoid]

it would be cool to have sendmail start as a daemon at start up so that it's running no matter who logs in. And so that if anyone logs out, it's still running.

I thought about editing the shell logins but I figured that would only run if the terminal app was loaded - and then mb only for a particular user.

I've been looking around and I can't find what i'm looking for... 'course I'm not sure exactly what I'm looking for.

Also, when I use the mail app in the command line, the email I send has the wrong return email address and I can't seem to find where it's storing the user return addy that it puts on outgoing mail.. that's a lesser concern tho.. I'd really just like to make sure sendmail is running all the time.

[Eugene]

Open a file in /System/Library/StartupItems/whatever/whatever and look at it.

They're just shell scripts, so you'll need something very basic:

#!/bin/sh

sendmail -whateveroptions


You could make it more complicated like with the if/then statements...

[altoid]

Thanks for the info.

So I went to check out the startupitmes folder and found that a Sendmail subdirectory with a starup script was already there. So I looked around for the system.log and found that the last thing the system logs reports happened at start up are messages from an attempt to start Sendmail.
*********************************************
Apr 6 06:17:45 localhost sendmail[254]: unable to qualify my own domain name (localhost) -- using short name
Apr 6 06:17:45 localhost sendmail[254]: NOQUEUE: SYSERR: putoutmsg (NO-HOST): error on output channel sending "451 4.0.0 fill_fd: before readcf: fd 1 not open: Bad file descriptor": Input/output error
Apr 6 06:17:45 localhost sendmail[254]: NOQUEUE: SYSERR(root): fill_fd: before readcf: fd 1 not open: Bad file descriptor
Apr 6 06:17:45 localhost sendmail[254]: NOQUEUE: SYSERR(root): fill_fd: before readcf: fd 2 not open: Bad file descriptor
********************************

I wasn't sure if there was something about the script itself, so I ran it.

%> sudo /system/library/startupitems/sendmail/sendmail

It seemed to start up okay, and a quick check of running processes confirmed it. So I checked the system.log again and found
*******************************
Apr 6 07:54:47 localhost sendmail[428]: My unqualified host name (localhost) unknown; sleeping for retry
Apr 6 07:55:47 localhost sendmail[428]: unable to qualify my own domain name (localhost) -- using short name
********************************

In anycase, the SMTP service is working fine now.


My computer does not have a domain name associated to it, I just use sendmail as my smtp cuz I have problems with getting my ISP to send emails that have return addresses other than what they sanction (those w/ their domain name in them). So far this has been a great solution to my email problems.

I'm not sure what to make of those error messages that appear in the syslog. Any idea why it wont load at startup?

[Eugene]

Could be the order in which it loads other network services...

You could also try assigning you box an arbitrary hostname or just the raw IP...