Hi, I'm just about to collapse into a fetal possition. :bawling:

A couple of weeks ago, I researched and designed a web application that I am now developing. Without having any prior knowledge of sendmail I stumbled on docuementation at www.sleepycat.com and www.sendmail.org and www.php.net that seemed to be the exact answer to my dreams. Essentially, I wanted to be able to automate updating and deleting and modifying entries in the virtusertable.db The table is going to get mighty big and I don't want to scipt some hacky solution where I crontab a call to newaliases to rehash the table. (Although I'm beggining to wonder whether setting up such a job a couple of times a day might be the easy way out). But I'm stubborn and obsessive and I hate the fact that I have now spent a day on this and I'm only left muddled and confused.

The documentation I read all seemed to push the idea of using a Berkeley DB3 format for the virtusertable. So, I've downloaded teh Berkeley libraries and includes and installed all that stuff OK. I've reconfigured and recompiled php to include DB3 support through the php DBA library of functions. I've written some test scripts that prove that php's support for Berkeley DB3 is working fine on test databases I have created through the scripts.

Now to Sendmail. Oh my lordy, lordy!!! As you can guess I'm a linux newbie. However, I am able to follow instructions and compile binaries when I need to. Well, I usually get things right on about the third go ;) However, the only way I've been able to install Sendmail is from RPMs sendmail-8.11.0-8.rpm, sendmail-cf.8.11.0-8.rpm and the documentation RPM. Can you believe that Redhat 7.0 doesn't install with the cf utility out of the box :mad: ?

But now, I have tried to install the latest sources from www.sendmail.org configuring to compile with BerkeleyDB support. I have tried reinstalling from the RPMS and configuring for BerkekeyDB support. And the bottom line is that I am very confused right now. I have not read one single guide that can walk me through what I want to do.

I would really like to be able to write some PHP scripts to manage the virtusertable. I don't care what the exact table format is - whether it is DB2, DB3, NEWDB, as they are all supposedly supported by the PHP DBA library.

I have searched high and low for some info specific to what I am trying to achieve. But alas the only posts to mailing groups and message boards I have read are all dead ends. Others have tried but I am yet to read a public post saying that anyone has achieved this ellusive feet!

Once I have set up a working solution on my local box, I will be hoping for a little assistance from my yet to be dedicated host to get sendmail configured on my dedicated server.

Tired and emotional!

LOL, I just looked at the description under my username. Yep, that about sums it up :D

No bother. I appear to have it all sorted out now. I won't know for sure until I've deployed and am testing on a dedicated server - but my php scripts appear to be reading/writing to the virtusertable.db and aliases.db files OK.

Funny, because several people have told me that this cannot be done (ie reading/writing to the virtusertable.db and aliases.db hash maps) from my php scripts. But my testing shows that is is technically possible. My only concern then is whether there is some other issue with perormance or something that I should know about? I really wanted to be able to allow users to set up their virtual accounts immediatly in real time without having to muck about with a flat file and rehashing the whole danged thing. I want this to be able to scale big time! :)