I just checked out the puppetlabs.com link. Looks like very helpful software
and I see that it runs on Ubuntu.
I am going to investigate that further and will most likely try it out.
I try to keep the environment as consistent as possible with Ubuntu being
the standard for our servers.
I had found that when the local_interfaces line was left as the default
setting (i.e., MAIN_LOCAL_INTERFACES not set), 127.0.0.1 was being excluded
in the output when doing netstat -plant.
I need 127.0.0.1 and I therefore have been setting MAIN_LOCAL_INTERFACES in
/etc/exim4/exim4.conf.template.
However, during my trial and error activities today, I realized that when
MAIN_LOCAL_INTERFACES is not set or is improperly set, then
/var/lib/exim4/config.autogenerated was setting local_interfaces to the
value of dc_local_interfaces in /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf which I
had configured to 192.168.121.123 but had not included 127.0.0.1. I
therefore just commented out dc_local_interfaces at this point because I am
using your ".include" solution and it is now working.
Thanks again.
-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Cheetham [
mailto:jim@inode.co.nz]
Sent: Saturday, July 17, 2010 4:13 PM
To: jwexler@???
Subject: Re: [exim] Set local_interfaces to contents of a file?
No problem.
I think in general you have been confusing things like lookups, which
can look in files, with the more generic facility. Unsurprisingly
.include is mentioned in the documentation, but of course you have to
know something like that is there :-)
For configuration management many people like puppet
http://www.puppetlabs.com/puppet/introduction/
I find that if you have an environment where all the machines are the
same distribution you're better off using something like a private
repository to publish your data, but in a mixed environment puppet is
ideal. It will definitely allow you to publish a machine-specific
customised config for exim :-)
On the other hand, you could just let exim listen on all interfaces,
unless there were a good reason not to (i.e. multiple other interfaces
which must not be running SMTP) - just don't use a local_interfaces line
at all and exim listens to *:25 by default.
- -jim
Quoting jwexler@??? (from 17/07/10 17:54):
> Jim,
>
> That was the solution! Thank you so much!!
>
> I was trying so many things. My hopes jumped a little when I found
> ${readfile{<file name>}{<eol string>}} in the manual but that had not
worked
> either.
>
> This is indeed very handy for us. It is indeed the latter purpose that
you
> mentioned - same configuration file for multiple servers. I agree that I
> should look into a config management tool. I am not familiar with what is
> out there or the use of them and thus have been doing consistency I guess
> the hard way.
>
> Thank you again. I really appreciate it.
>
> JW
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: exim-users-bounces@??? [mailto:exim-users-bounces@exim.org] On
> Behalf Of Jim Cheetham
> Sent: Saturday, July 17, 2010 1:48 PM
> To: exim-users@???
> Cc: jwexler@???
> Subject: Re: [exim] Set local_interfaces to contents of a file?
>
> Quoting jwexler@??? (from 17/07/10 15:21):
>> I have been trying to set local_interfaces equal to the contents of a
file
>> on the file system. OS is Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid. Exim is 4.71.
>
> Well, you could just use ".include" to add the file contents ... note
> that ".include" likes to be the only directive on a line, so using line
> continuations is needed ...
>
> local_interfaces = \
> .include /etc/fulcrumIpSettings
>
> I'm not quite sure why this is useful for you; I suppose if the local IP
> addresses changed a lot you might get value out of a process updating
> that simple file for you. Or if you were copying the same config file
> out to multiple servers, if would help -- but under those circumstances
> a config management tool would probably be a better long-term choice.
>
> -jim
>
- --
Jim Cheetham Director, Inode Ltd. Dunedin NZ
jim@??? http://inode.co.nz/
tel:+64-3-951-3133 mobile:+64-21-227-0015
skype:jimcheetham jabber:inodeconz@???
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