Sys V.0 'delivermail' problem

[Steve Lademann]

I'm having a problem with our mail network, and I'm wondering if anyone
out there has any bright ideas about how I can get round it.

We have an amorphous collection of Unix machines running a wide variety
of different flavoured Unixes (Unices?). There is a backbone VAX 11/750
running 4.2BSD which, amoung other things, works as a site mailer. It
currently distributes mail to Ultrix 1.1, 1.2, AT&T V.0 and V.2 over an
Ethernet, and to other machines using a variety of PSS, dial-up, and
direct lines using sendmail and UK-1.4 sendmail configurator with local
mods to add an extra rsh mailer.

The problem is with the V.0 machines, which happen to be Torches. They
use remsh to mail the 11/750, which works OK. As they are not equipped
with anything that listens on sockets, I am using rsh to send the mail
to delivermail on the Torch.  The problem is that the delivermail '-f'
switch (or -r) which can, I gather from the documentation, be used to
pretend that the mail came from somewhere else other than the logged-in
user blows up dramatically with all sorts of weird, inexplicable errors
caused I would guess by argv's and argc's getting corrupted. Now, I
haven't got any sources for V.0, so I can't go and debug delivermail,
and apart from that, the Torches are popping up on our Ethernet from
all sorts of places with monotonous regularity, and ensuring that
bug-fixed software is installed on them is a horrendous control problem
which I don't wish to get involved in, so does anyone have any
suggestions? At present, by omitting the '-f', all mail to the Torches
appears to come from user 'root', although I have used the '-s' switch
to prevent stripping of the 'From' lines in the message, so the
recipient does know where it came from originally. The problem is with
undelivered mail. It can't be mailed back, as delivermail thinks it
came from root. The best I can arrange is that it gets put into
/dead.letter. Not really a friendly way of dealing with it!  Is this
problem specific to Torches, or do all V.0 systems exhibit this
problem? (N.B. it's ok on V.2). Is there another way of delivering mail
which allows mail back, but doesn't involve an overworked system
manager in too much coding?

Thanks in anticipation


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|Steve Lademann         |Phone: 44 727 59292 x326               |
|Marconi Instruments Ltd|UUCP : ...mcvax!ukc!hrc63!miduet!steve |
|St. Albans    AL4 0JN  |NRS  : steve at uk.co.gec-mi-at           |
|Herts.   UK            |                                       |
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