May 19, 2005

[Research] Cyrus, LDAP, and Sendmail aliases

I got the aliases problem sussed out. It wasn’t a Sendmail or Cyrus problem but an LDAP problem.

Sendmail was happily looking up alias@domain, rewriting it to alias, and not getting any farther — and then Cyrus said it didn’t know anything about alias.

The problem was that it was looking up alias@domain in LDAP, saying, “yup, that’s local, so it’s just alias,” and then trying to look up alias in LDAP and failing (since only alias@domain is listed as a mail attribute). The fix is to put alias as another mail attribute, and it looks it up just fine.

Previous alias LDAP entry:

dn: cn=ALIAS, ou=Aliases, dc=earlham, dc=edu
objectClass: top
objectClass: groupOfUniqueNames
objectClass: mailrecipient
objectClass: mailGroup
cn: ALIAS
mail: ALIAS@earlham.edu
mailHost: sith.earlham.edu
mgrpRFC822MailMember: recipient

The new one adds one mail attribute:

dn: cn=ALIAS, ou=Aliases, dc=earlham, dc=edu
objectClass: top
objectClass: groupOfUniqueNames
objectClass: mailrecipient
objectClass: mailGroup
cn: ALIAS
mail: ALIAS@earlham.edu
mail: ALIAS
mailHost: sith.earlham.edu
mgrpRFC822MailMember: recipient

This lets sendmail search on the LHS part of the alias@domain and find a match.

Reference this entry for how I thought it should have been done last fall (I was closer than I ended up doing it).

Posted by Rowan Littell at May 19, 2005 03:34 PM