I was trying to make a recent, plain Redhat Enterprise 3.0 server here work with SMTP Auth using Sendmail (just plain text AUTH).

A first step is to set the M4 configuration with the following lines:

TRUST_AUTH_MECH(`EXTERNAL LOGIN PLAIN')dnl
define(`confAUTH_MECHANISMS', `EXTERNAL LOGIN PLAIN')dnl

then rebuilding the file. (I use webmin, from www.webmin.com, for administrative tasks.)

The M4 configuration wasn't the hard part though. AUTH still wasn't working.

I finally discovered the actual problems. Sendmail relies on a program called saslauthd to perform the actual authentication. There are two important issues.

1) saslauthd is NOT turned on by default. It needs to be set to start at boot time (and of course manually started if it's not running already.)

2) There is a configuration file at /etc/sysconfig/saslauthd which by default sets a variable:
MECH=pam

To authenticate against the actual Unix user/password, change this to:
MECH=shadow

And that's it. AUTH then works as expected.

I hope this saves somebody the same headaches I had. I'm considering working up a web page to guide people through turning a "stock" EV1 system into a functional box.

Phil

You could have saved your headaches searching the forum.

You already had a how-to in this same forum:) but it's more than 30 days old and is not showed on the list unless you select to see posts from the beginning

http://forum.ev1servers.net/showthread.php...&threadid=41153

Ok, I see that now, thanks.

Do you know of a good site that specifically addresses getting a plain EV1 server into a working machine?