Solaris

We are having a problem with names being dropped from the /etc/mail/aliases file. There's no pattern to the names being dropped. It is very random.

We are running sendmail 8.14.3 on a Solaris 10 server. There are about 9000 lines in the /etc/mail/aliases file.

Is there a limitation on the size or number of lines in the aliases file? Is there a bug in Solaris 10 that might account for this? I've not seen one but I might have missed it. Due to operational constraints we don't implement the recommended patches.

Any help would be appreciated.

sendmail does not write to /etc/mail/aliases file. It reads a database created by "newaliases" (or "sendmail -bi").
How do you update your aliases file?
Does the timestamp and content change on your /etc/mail/aliases file unexpectedly?

Do you have a discrepency between the output of "praliases" and the original /etc/mail/aliases file?

The line limit is likely BUFSIZ which can be 4096

Note the following about setting up mail aliases in /etc/aliases:

*

Mail aliases in /etc/aliases are public. This means that if you set up a mail alias called softball, anyone can send to softball@your-machinename and make use of the mail alias.
*

When the mail is sent, /etc/aliases mail aliases are not expanded. For example, if you send mail to softball@machinename, that's how the mail reads when it is received. The recipients know what the mail alias is, but not necessarily who else is on it.

The format of mail aliases that are created in /etc/aliases is somewhat different from those in .mailrc. Each /etc/aliases alias should use the following format:

*

The name of the mail alias, followed by a colon (
*

The recipients (logins and machine names), separated by commas. Note that the mail alias does not have to be on a single line.

To modify your /etc/aliases file, you must first become root. If root is password protected, you'll need to know the root password.

To answer methyl we use vi to edit the file then run newaliases on it.

The size of our /etc/mail/aliases file is 481813. Like I said in the original posting there are about 9000 lines to it. Here is the format which we use.

username (REAL NAME): username@domain.name

This has some other senior folks baffled at how names seem to drop out of this file at random. The name isn't necessarily the last entry in the file. I don't believe anyone is doing a dd on the lines. This isn't something that happens once in a blue moon. This is an ongoing issue that seems to come up maybe a half dozen times a week across three different domains.

Have we established whether the lines are disappearing from the flat file or the aliases database or both? Does the timestamp change on the flat file? Does anybody cut/paste from a Microsoft Windows file?

The names are disappearing from the flat file. When mail comes in from an external source we see "Unknown User" in syslog. So they are disappearing from the previous vi session or the latest one.

There are six people that have root access on the servers having this problem. I believe five of us have SUN workstations and one, our team lead, has a Windows workstation but uses PuTTY to access the servers.

In an effort to try to figure out what is going on I'm going to try to do all the modifications to the aliases file. I don't think the timestamp is changing because we aren't seeing any "errors" in the messages log that the aliases.db is out of date.

Any pattern to the names that are disappearing? Are they members of a large alias list or is it just random? Have you checked for unprintable characters in the file?