Sendmail and VCSA - sendmail configuration

[jgmerritt]

Everytime I update vCenter Appliance 6.5, I have to go into the sendmail.cf file and edit it in order for sendmail to start up and send alerts. I have opened several tickets, and I seem to be ignored. The last ticket the support engineer told me to send in a feature request.

The VCSA I have is a VCSA that was converted from a windows vCenter server with MS-SQL to a VCSA 6.5 appliance. The sendmail configuration change that I implemented came from a fresh VCSA install that I deployed to see what the sendmail.cf looked like.

I have to edit the sendmail file as follows:

diff sendmail.cf.good sendmail.cf.orig

247,248c247

< #O DaemonPortOptions=Addr=127.0.0.1,Port=smtp

< O DaemonPortOptions=Port=587, Name=MSA, M=E

---

> O DaemonPortOptions=Addr=127.0.0.1,Port=smtp

If I leave the DeamonPortOptions command to listen on the loopback, sendmail never starts as it cannot bind to the loopback as seen in the messages log:

2018-03-23T18:58:28.294347+00:00 vcenter sendmail[1104]: daemon Daemon1: problem creating SMTP socket

2018-03-23T18:58:33.294195+00:00 vcenter sendmail[1104]: NOQUEUE: SYSERR(root): opendaemonsocket: daemon Daemon1: cannot bind: Address already in use

2018-03-23T18:58:34.530583+00:00 vcenter sendmail[1104]: daemon Daemon1: problem creating SMTP socket

2018-03-23T18:58:38.426811+00:00 vcenter systemd[1]: sendmail.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=71/n/a

2018-03-23T18:58:38.427170+00:00 vcenter systemd[1]: sendmail.service: Unit entered failed state.

Has anyone else seen this issue? I suppose I could deploy the fresh VCSA 6.5 appliance and restore a backup from the one I currently have.

-jim

[msripada]

2018-03-23T18:58:33.294195+00:00 vcenter sendmail[1104]: NOQUEUE: SYSERR(root): opendaemonsocket: daemon Daemon1: cannot bind: Address already in use

Address already in use ..  I do not know if the port is in use or the service never released the port..

Thanks,

MS

[ashwin_prakash]

Replace the sendmail.cf with m4 m4/cf.m4 sendmail.mc.

Note: Take a backup/snapshot of VCSA before performing these steps.

1. Log in to VCSA through SSH as a root user.

2. Run these commands to take a backup of sendmail.cf:

cd/etc/mail

cp sendmail.cf sendmail.cf.backup

3. Replace the sendmail.cf with m4 m4/cf.m4 sendmail.mc:

cd /etc/mail

m4 m4/cf.m4 sendmail.mc > sendmail.cf

4. Restart sendmail service:

5. systemctl restart sendmail

[jgmerritt]

I moved the old sendmail.cf file back into place and restarted sednmail service.

"netstat -anpt | grep :25" shows nothing on port 25 anywhere, and "ps -ef | grep sendmail" shows no running sendmail process.

This is in /var/log/messages:

2018-03-27T12:20:41.221981+00:00 vcenter sendmail[2106]: NOQUEUE: SYSERR(root): opendaemonsocket: daemon Daemon1: cannot bind: Address already in use

2018-03-27T12:20:41.222314+00:00 vcenter sendmail[2106]: daemon Daemon1: problem creating SMTP socket

2018-03-27T12:20:41.222536+00:00 vcenter systemd[1]: sendmail.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=71/n/a

2018-03-27T12:20:41.222809+00:00 vcenter sendmail[2106]: NOQUEUE: SYSERR(root): opendaemonsocket: daemon Daemon1: server SMTP socket wedged: exiting

I can fix this with my sendmail.cf file with the following change (sendmail.cf.good is my modified config:

"diff sendmail.cf.orig sendmail.cf.good"

247c247,248

< O DaemonPortOptions=Addr=127.0.0.1,Port=smtp

---

> #O DaemonPortOptions=Addr=127.0.0.1,Port=smtp

> O DaemonPortOptions=Port=587, Name=MSA, M=E

Since sendmail on VCSA is outbound only my configuration is appropriate, and it actually came from a fresh 6.5 VCSA installation, I did not create it. I don't understand why my upgraded system is incorrect or at least not working.

[ashwin_prakash]

This issue occurs due to incorrect entry in configuration file, Since which we have to manually edit the post configuration.