vacation with sendmail.

Bill McGonigle bill at bfccomputing.com
Tue Nov 2 14:25:01 EST 2004


On Nov 2, 2004, at 13:07, Jason wrote:

> The closest I find to that is
> /usr/share/man/ja/man1/vacation.1.gz. I have unzipped vacation.1.gz 
> and now
> have /usr/share/man/ja/man1/vacation.1.

The .1 on the end of the file means it's a section 1 (user programs) 
man page.  This is what's displayed when you type 'man vacation'.   One 
of the features of modern 'man' is to uncompress any compressed man 
pages before displaying, to save some disk space.  So you don't 
actually need to uncompress it.

What you want is the vacation RPM:

   
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/contrib/libc6/i386/vacation-1.2.6.1-6.i386.rpm

download it and 'rpm -ivh' it.

Redhat probably doesn't distribute it because it can be easily 
misconfigured to create mail loops, respond to mailing lists, etc., and 
from a security perspective you usually _don't_ want to tell people 
when you're going to be away since that makes social engineering 
attacks that much easier to implement.

With Sendmail you'll need to set it up as a valid mail shell.  If it 
installs into /usr/bin/vacation, you'll do:

   ln -s /usr/bin/vacation /etc/smrsh/vacation

That will cause Sendmail to permit it to run.  I suspect the docs 
you've found already (or just 'man vacation') will have a short example 
on how to configure the appropriate files in the user's home directory.

Note that you may also need to enable it in the sendmail configuration 
file.  'cd' to /etc/mail and edit sendmail.mc per your instructions, 
then run 'make' to recreate the sendmail.cf file.  Type 'service 
sendmail restart' to make sendmail reread the config file.

Lots of this is Redhat specific and not well covered in the sendmail 
docs.

-Bill
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