Hello, I'm what you would call a linux novice and I'm doing an internship at an office which has a linux email server. I want to know what commands to use and where to use them in order to 1) find out what type and version of linux we're running and, 2) find out what version of sendmail we're running. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanx, Joe

watch the lines that scroll by at boot during your boot process it will tell you what distro you are running also try the sysinfo command sendmail ... go to console type man sendmail should list the release in the man pages

thank you for your reply dorfen. But when I typed man sendmail the closest thing it displayed to a version was - Sendmail(8). So does this mean that I have sendmail version 8.0, or is there some other place in the manual that displays the version #? I'm probably just missing something obvious.

As for linux version, you can use "uname -a". The sendmail(8) means that it's the sendmail man page from section 8. If you connect your your port 25, you will see the sendmail smtp banner, including version number. Running "sendmail -bs" does the same.

thanx dfx. sendmail -bs displayed the version #. But to get back to my prompt I typed quit and after I did that it said it listed my host and domain name and said "closing connection." is this going to be a problem for me and if so, How can I fix it?

Why do you think this is a problem? The "-bs" switch tells sendmail to enter smtp emulation mode. What you see are normal smtp protocol messages. When you connect to your port 25, you'll see exactly the same, and well, "QUIT" is the command to terminate an smtp connection. All readings nominal there, sir. Note that the -bs switch isn't really meant to be for checking the version, there are other switches for that. But I use them so rarely that I can't remember them. If you read the sendmail admin guide, you'll find them.

If you're running an RPM distro, you can find out version numbers by typing: #rpm -q NameOfPackage For quite a few programs you can type: #NameOfPackage -v but some applications use -v for other things (eg verbose) #NameOfPackage --help is normally quite useful too if you don't want to trawl through a big man page