Sendmail aliases mystery

[Toomas Aas]

Hello!

After updating my firewall from RELENG_4_8 to RELENG_4_9 I observe an 
interesting behaviour of Sendmail (using the base system Sendmail). It 
doesn't seem to honor it's aliases database after server is started, 
but starts to do so once I run 'cd /etc/mail && make restart'.

I have the following line in /etc/mail/aliases:

root: toomas.aas at raad.tartu.ee

However, the daily periodic reports (which is essentially the only mail 
this box sends) are sent to root at local-hostname.local-domain.tld, which 
in this case means that they essentially go nowhere. When the system is 
in this state and I use 'mail root' from the command line, the mail 
also goes to root at . However, after I manually restart Sendmail as 
described above, mail to root starts to go to it's destined address 
(toomas.aas at raad.tartu.ee).

The dates on /etc/mail/aliases and /etc/mail/aliases.db indicate that 
'newaliases' has been run after modifying the aliases file. I have run 
it a couple of times extra, just for the good measure, but it doesn't 
seem to change Sendmail's behaviour.

grep sendmail /etc/rc.conf:
sendmail_enable="NO"

grep root /etc/mail/aliases:
# Pretty much everything else in this file points to "root", so
# you would do well in either reading root's mailbox or forwarding
# root's email from here.
root:   toomas.aas at raad.tartu.ee
postmaster: root
bin:    root
bind:   root
daemon: root
games:  root
kmem:   root
man:    root
news:   root
nobody: root
operator: root
pop:    root
sshd:   root
system: root
toor:   root
tty:    root
uucp:   root
xten:   root
abuse:  root
# noc:          root
security:       root
ftp:            root
# hostmaster:   root
# webmaster:    root
--
Toomas Aas | toomas.aas at raad.tartu.ee | http://www.raad.tartu.ee/~toomas/
* 24 hours in a day, 24 beers in a case. Coincidence?