sendmail

John Thayer Jensen j.jensen at auckland.ac.nz
Wed May 10 20:51:56 UTC 2000


"Jim Reid" <jim at rfc1035.com> wrote in message
news:23932.957949721 at gromit.rfc1035.com...
> >>>>> "John" == John Thayer Jensen <john at harts.co.nz> writes:
>
>     John> I'm sure this is a very newbie question, but I just can't
>     John> figure it out.  New Linux machine.  I can ppp to my ISP just
>     John> fine.  The machine is called linux1.harts.co.nz.  The name
>     John> harts.co.nz has a DNS entry but linux1.harts.co.nz does not.
>     John> If I telnet to an SMTP host port 25 I can send mail as
>     John> me at harts.co.nz just fine, but when I try to use mail or elm
>     John> or something to do the same thing I always get a bounce back
>     John> with an error 501 saying that it has to be able to find the
>     John> domain linux1.harts.co.nz in DNS.  I have tried various
>     John> things using linuxconf, directly editing sendmail.mc and
>     John> regenerating, directly editing sendmail.cf.  No go.  It
>     John> always tries to do an SMTP connexion as
>     John> me at linux1.harts.co.nz rather than without the linux1.
>
> Well the obvious thing to do is make an entry for linux1.harts.co.nz
> in the DNS. If this is the name your mail software uses when it tries
> to find a local SMTP server, then that name has to be in the DNS!

     Maybe I didn't explain enough.  That machine is not on the
     Internet.  It is just on my internal network and has an IP of
     10.0.0.1.  It dials up to my ISP.  I suppose I could ask my
     ISP to make a DNS entry, but it's not going to be receiving
     mail, not now, so I suppose its MX record would be that of
     my ISP.  BTW, when it does a PPP connexion via my ISP,
     of course it gets a real IP address for the duration of that
     session, but it's dynamic, not always the same address.

     But frankly I thought this shouldn't be necessary.  The machine
     should, I thought, just be able to connect as harts.co.nz, which
     *does* have a DNS entry.  When I use telnet to do that, it
     works fine.

> In
> addition, sendmail needs to be able to lookup this name in the DNS
> (and maybe a reverse lookup of its IP address too?). Please note that
> just because you've called this Linux box linux1.harts.co.nz doesn't
> make it so. Lookups for that name have to work before you can assume
> that the name really does exist. The rest of the world's software has
> to know how to lookup that name and if you can't/won't configure the
> DNS to make that happen....

     Yes, I understand.  That's why I want the machine to present itself
     as harts.co.nz which *does* have a DNS entry and a permanent
     IP address.

>
> BTW, mail for harts.co.nz gets delivered to ps.gen.nz. That's what it
> says in the DNS right now. I think you need to talk to your ISP and
> ask them to advise you how to set things up. They probably have a
> better idea than this list has about what you're trying to achieve
> anyway. You'll probably have to reconfigure sendmail once the DNS is
> set up correctly. Isn't all this stuff explained in those Linux HOW-TO
> documents?

     I have talked with my ISP and yes, I know what goes on now.
     He hasn't figured it out yet, and is going to come next week and
     have a go with me, but ... we have to pay him :-(  So I was trying
     to figure it out myself.  What is *actually* going on, if you want to
     know, is that we are trying to replace our NT mail server, which
     reads mail from ps.gen.nz via POP, with this new Unix machine,
     but right now I am just playing with it.  Despite my floundering,
     I know a certain amount about DNS, sendmail, IP, etc - even
     Unix - but my last extensive Unix experience (until this recent go)
     was in 1990, on version 7 :-)

     Thanks.

     jj

     John Thayer Jensen
     john at harts.co.nz
     j.jensen at auckland.ac.nz


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