Sendmail and SMTP AUTH on RedHat Linux 9
Part 1 - Installing Sendmail

Written by Tony Bhimani
December 5, 2004

Requirements
RedHat Linux 9
Sendmail 8.12.8
Cyrus SASL 2.1.10

This tutorial describes the steps for installing the Sendmail MTA with SMTP AUTH to allow only authorized users to send email from the server. I'll be using RedHat Linux 9 and Sendmail 8.12.8 while focusing on the RPM installation method. I have broken the guide into four parts since there is a lot of information (installing Sendmail, adding SMTP AUTH, configuring a single domain and email account, concluding with testing the server). I haven't tested these steps on other Linux distributions, but they should work for other RedHat versions (including Fedora).

We need to check whether Sendmail is already installed. Issue the following command.

rpm -qa | grep -i sendmail

You should see something similar to this if Sendmail is installed.

If Sendmail is not installed or any packages are missing, then we will need to download and install it. We'll be getting our packages from this location using wget.
ftp://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/redhat/redhat/linux/updates/9/en/os/i386/

Make sure you are root and switch to your home directory. Create a directory called sendmail and move into it.

su -
[enter root password]
cd ~
mkdir sendmail
cd sendmail

Now issue these commands to download the Sendmail RPM packages.

wget ftp://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/redhat/redhat/linux/updates/9/en/os/i386/sendmail-8.12.8-9.90.i386.rpm
wget ftp://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/redhat/redhat/linux/updates/9/en/os/i386/sendmail-cf-8.12.8-9.90.i386.rpm
wget ftp://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/redhat/redhat/linux/updates/9/en/os/i386/sendmail-devel-8.12.8-9.90.i386.rpm
wget ftp://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/redhat/redhat/linux/updates/9/en/os/i386/sendmail-doc-8.12.8-9.90.i386.rpm

You should have all three packages downloaded in the sendmail directory. Verify this by doing a directory list (ls).

Now we will install Sendmail. Issue this command.

rpm -ivh sendmail*.rpm

You should see the RPM Package Manager install Sendmail.

Sendmail should now be installed. If the installation fails, make sure that Cyrus SASL is installed (and any other dependencies). Issue this command.

rpm -qa | grep -i cyrus

You should get something similar to the following.

If any of the Cyrus SASL packages are missing, download and install them. Then try installing the Sendmail packages again.

wget http://download.fedoralegacy.org/redhat/9/os/i386/cyrus-sasl-2.1.10-4.i386.rpm
wget http://download.fedoralegacy.org/redhat/9/os/i386/cyrus-sasl-plain-2.1.10-4.i386.rpm
wget http://download.fedoralegacy.org/redhat/9/os/i386/cyrus-sasl-devel-2.1.10-4.i386.rpm
wget http://download.fedoralegacy.org/redhat/9/os/i386/cyrus-sasl-md5-2.1.10-4.i386.rpm

Now we'll start the Sendmail service. Issue the following command.

service sendmail start

Finally we'll double check if the service is running (better to be safe than sorry). Issue the following command.

ps aux | grep -i sendmail

Everything looks good. Next we will add SMTP AUTH to the server.

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