Sendmail supports two different formats
for the local (on disk) version of databases,
notably the
aliases database.
At least one of these should be defined if at all possible.
- NDBM
- The ``new DBM'' format,
available on nearly all systems around today.
This was the preferred format prior to 4.4BSD.
It allows such complex things as multiple databases
and closing a currently open database.
- NEWDB
- The new database package from Berkeley.
If you have this, use it.
It allows
long records,
multiple open databases,
real in-memory caching,
and so forth.
You can define this in conjunction with one of the other two;
if you do,
old databases are read,
but when a new database is created it will be in NEWDB format.
As a nasty hack,
if you have NEWDB, NDBM, and NIS defined,
and if the alias file name includes the substring
/yp/,
sendmail will create both new and old versions of the alias file
during a
newalias command.
This is required because the Sun NIS/YP system
reads the DBM version of the alias file.
It's ugly as sin,
but it works.
If neither of these are defined,
sendmail reads the alias file into memory on every invocation.
This can be slow and should be avoided.
There are also several methods for remote database access:
- NIS
- Sun's Network Information Services (formerly YP).
- NISPLUS
- Sun's NIS+ services.
- NETINFO
- NeXT's NetInfo service.
- HESIOD
- Hesiod service (from Athena).
Other compilation flags are set in conf.h
and should be predefined for you
unless you are porting to a new environment.
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Last modified: Friday April 02, 1999.