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Postfix
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where /path/to/mydests.txt is the name of a file containing your domain or host-
names, one per line. Dr. Venema suggests not using comments in this file, so as “to
avoid surprises.”
There were two other interesting things we did in the “quick and dirty” procedure.
One was to start Postfix with the command
postfix start. Just as BIND uses ndc (or
rndc) to control the various processes that make up BIND, the postfix command can
be used to manage Postfix.
The most common invocations of the postfix command are
postfix start, postfix
stop
,andpostfix reload. start and stop are obvious; reload causes postfix to reload
its configuration files without stopping and restarting. Another handy one is
postfix
flush
, which forces Postfix to attempt to send all queued messages immediately. This
is useful after changing a setting that may have been causing problems: in the event
that your change worked, all messages delayed by the problem will go out immedi-
ately. (They would go out regardless, but not as quickly).
In Step 6, we added a line to /etc/aliases to divert root’s email to an unprivileged
account. This is healthy paranoia: we don’t want to log in as the superuser for mun-
dane activities such as viewing system reports, which are sometimes emailed to root.
Be careful, however: if