[OmniOS-discuss] Bloody // mailwrapper & mta mediator

[Andy]

Hi,

I'm doing some testing with bloody, mainly to look at the new linked
ipkg zones. Got distracted for now with the addition of mailwrapper and
the new mta mediator which have come from Illumos 5166.

Mailwrapper is completely unecessary on an IPS distribution as it
effectively duplicates the function of mediators but I can see from
discussion on illumos-discuss that it was added to support
non-IPS distributions and I can see the logic in that at the Illumos
level. However, it's giving me a bit of an upgrade headache which I'm working
through and looking for ideas/help.

At Citrus, we're in the business of running mail relays and our MTA of
choice is Sendmail. Being involved in the Sendmail community, we're
actually runinng a beta of sendmail 8.15.2 as we need some of the TLS
and IPv6 enhancements it provides.

Whilst I embrace OmniOS' KYSTY principle (and it's one of the reasons we
chose OmniOS in the first place), Sendmail is one of the packages that we
deliver using standard paths and service names. That is, configuration
files under /etc/mail and a service that can be managed as just
'sendmail'.

To date (we're running r151012 in production), OmniOS doesn't install
an MTA by default but, with the integration of 5166, sendmail becomes
a dependency of mailwrapper and mailwrapper is required by SUNWcs.

Problem 1 - That immediately causes a conflict on uprade as we already have a
package which delivers /usr/lib/sendmail etc. That's easily fixed by making
these mediated links and that allows us to switch our sendmail in to replace
the default package.

aomni# (162) pkg mediator -a
MEDIATOR VER. SRC. VERSION IMPL. SRC. IMPLEMENTATION
mta      site              site       citrus-sendmail
mta      system            system     mailwrapper
mta      system            system     sendmail

Problem 2 - /etc/mail is populated by the OmniOS sendmail package.
I could work around that by rebuilding our sendmail package to use
/etc/opt/citrus-mail or something similar for its configuration. I don't
really want to do that as the change will have an impact on backend
systems and it will definitely confuse the people who look after the
systems for a while.

Problem 3 - sendmail drops in /etc/init.d/sendmail - a script which
enables the standard sendmail service. One of our support staff is bound
to type '/etc/init.d/sendmail start' at some point even though on our
current systems that command doesn't exist. That script is flagged as
preserve=true in the manifest so I suppose I could just add an exit 0 near
the top!

Problem 4 - IPS doesn't allow for mediated services so we'll always have
svc:/network/smtp:sendmail. Again, we can rebuild ours to use
svc:/network/smtp:citrus-sendmail or similar, but everyone is used to
managing sendmail as just 'sendmail'.

This is a long way of me asking if mailwrapper could be removed from
OmniOS as it isn't required for an IPS distribution. That would remove the
requirement to have the standard sendmail package installed at all - just
like <=r151012. It would mean that 'mailx' doesn't work but that should be
expected if you haven't installed an MTA and is presumably the current
behaviour.

Can anyone see any other practical and supportable options that would
allow us to replace the sendmail package wholesale?

Thanks in advance,

Andy
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