tlug: sendmail ritual

[Yong-Ming Hua <yhua@example.com>]

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tlug note from Yong-Ming Hua <yhua@example.com>
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Hello,

     This is Yong-Ming Hua from UEC(university of
Electrical Communicatios). 

     I recently made two Linux servers with hopelessly
old machines. Kernel is 2.0.0. with JE. I put CERN,
or to be correct, w3c.....and Japanese sendmail,etc...
     I managed to send mails all right. But for some
reason I could not receive one! When I tried to send
messages from other machines, error message was 'aliases
db can't be opened', or something like that. So I made
aliases with only one entry root:xxx under /etc/ and
typed /usr/lib/sendmail -bi. After that everything went
all right. Now here is my question.
     Do I have to do this every time I make a new
server with Linux? Is it some kind of ritual? Why doesn't
the system make dummy aliases file under /etc for us?
Could anyone give me reasonable answer, please?

  With Regards,
  Yong-Ming Hua exhausted in fixing sendmail protocol.

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_/Yong-Ming Hua<D1@example.com at UEC>-----Lab.2                        _/
_/E-mail: 1. yhua@example.com 2. yhua@example.com    _/
_/URL:http://www.ai.is.uec.ac.jp/u/yhua                                 _/
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