Famous Belgians: an occasional series

For some reason the BBC are devoting half an hour to Jacques Brel. I've only been listening to the show for five minutes and already he's been compared to Joe Strummer and Jesus Christ...

SMTP authentication howto

The trick to setting up SMTP client authentication with sendmail seems to be the following:

1. mkdir -m 700 /etc/mail/auth
2. vi /etc/mail/auth/client-info
3. Dump the following into the file: 'AuthInfo:smtphost.isp "U:localuser" "I:remoteuser" "P:smtppassword" "R:smtphost.isp" "M:DIGEST-MD5 CRAM-MD5 LOGIN PLAIN"' with the various bits and pieces tuned to reflect your setup.
4. cd /etc/mail/auth; makemap hash client-info < client-info
5. vi /etc/mail/sendmail.mc
6. Add 'FEATURE(`authinfo',`hash /etc/mail/auth/client-info')'
7. m4 sendmail.mc > sendmail.cf
8. kill -HUP `cat /var/run/sendmail.pid`

Easy when you know how...

DNS woes

I've got some sort of reverse DNS problem with OS X, but I'm not quite sure why. Basically, ssh takes forever to initialise the connection and a verbose trace shows that it's timing out trying to map the IP address of the target box to a hostname. I've checked all the obvious area: /etc/hosts is correct, NetInfo is shiny, lookupd has been tweaked to consult files and NI ahead of DNS, but the problem remains. Hmm...