Mon Dec 8 13:16:01 EST 1997 - (Greg A. Woods) woods@planix.com
This beta release was prompted by a Planix client who needed a relay-
resistant mailer on a firewall that gateways to many virtual domains on
a private network. This release fixes some problems with handling of
route address, esp. with SMTP; some other problems with the
gethostbyaddr router driver, and lastly fixes a long standing memory
corruption bug. The default gethostbyaddr router driver now also has
the 'always' attribute set in order to reduce the number of bogus DNS
queries that subsequent calls to a bind driver would cause.
The latter fix was assisted by newly added support for malloc debug
libraries. While I claim to have added support for both the SunOS-4
debugging malloc and Mark Moraes Malloc library I've only tested the
former. I was al ready to test Mark's library when I discovered similar
features in SunOS-4 and since I didn't want to disturb the problem too
much before I tracked it down I used the SunOS-4 library only. Mark's
library has some significant advantages over the traditional SunOS-4
library though (both for debugging and for long running processes) and
having used it in the past I still highly recommend it. I was going to
try Kiem-Phong Vo's Vmalloc library too as it has extensive debugging
debugging support, but I've not yet used it so maybe next time.
See the CHANGES file for further information.
Note that the anti-relay feature is still not yet compatible with UUCP
gateways as mentioned by a warning not int the CHANGES file.
The README still notes the official FTP site as UUNET, but of course if
you look there you'll find they've been out of disk space for a number
of months and have been unable to mirror anything at all. At the moment
Planix has adequate bandwidth to offer full access to the Smail archive.
Note though that our FTP server is also a personal workstation and
further that it tracks NetBSD-current rather closely, so it may not be
available 100% of the time.
As always the ToDo and PROJECTS files list a growing number of things
that various people think should be worked on. Patches that eliminate
items from these files are always welcome! If you'd like to work on any
of the bigger projects just send a note to and
let us know so we can help co-ordinate and possibly give you access to
the CVS repository. See the README and the file Smail3-devel for more
information.
Remember to use the smailbug utility to submit patches, change requests,
bug reports and other stuff that needs to be recorded so it won't get
lost or forgotten! (There's now a symlink installed in the
smail_bin_dir to make it easier to access this script, and there's a new
manual page for it too.)