Sendmail Woes

[Default42]

I have a computer sitting on an intranet and isolated from the internet. I don't care about recieving emails from this machine, but I would like to send them out to the intranet. I am finding this to be more of a trick than I originally thought it would be. When I try to send a mail (joeshmoe@somewhere.com) it says:

"stat=Deferred: Name server: somewhere.com.: host name lookup failure"

I get this even though I can ping somewhere.com....any ideas?

 

[sleipnir214]

From that machine can you peform an MX lookup on somewhere.com? Want the best answers? Ask the best questions:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

TANSTAAFL!

 

[Default42]

MX lookup? Maybe I should have mentioned this is for RedHat 8.0.

 

[sleipnir214]

Your OS doesn't matter -- this requirement is built into the core of the internet.

An SMTP server needs to know to which server to connect to pass on the mail for a particular domain.

So every domain which will receive email must have an MX record defined in DNS.

The MX record in DNS defines the "Mail Exchanger" for a domain (though a domain can have more than one MX).

The Mail Exchanger for a domain is that machine which knows how to handle email for the domain.
Want the best answers? Ask the best questions:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

TANSTAAFL!

 

[maximilln]

Sendmail may be using custom methods for checking the hostname. If sendmail doesn't know about the availability of the nameserver or how to properly query the nameserver it will choke.

Installing sendmail from source is tricky. Installing sendmail from a .deb package is easy. I don't use .rpm packages.

Installing sendmail from source is on my personal to-do list. If you're installing sendmail from a .deb package and you still have this problem then you should reinstall and use the built-in default options whenever possible.

Detailed documentation at

http://www.tldp.org