sendmail 8.9.1 problems (NIS, DNS)

2007-12-25 9:25:00

Hi,

first, I would like to thank the following people for their immediate help:

Klorese, Roger B.A. <rogerk@veritas.com>

Ray Delaney <rdelaney@bbt.com>

Martin D. Baldenegro (RRNC) <mdb@dosmanos.bolix.com>

Marco Greene <cmgreene@netcom.ca>

Ken Farmer <kfarmer@farmer.org>

Chad Price <cprice@molbio.unmc.edu>

Ray Delaney <rdelaney@bbt.com>

and in particular

Bismark Espinoza <bismark@alta.jpl.nasa.gov>

Anvar Bagautdinov <Anvar.Bagautdinov@Sun-Center.Nsk.SU>

who gave the most useful input.

2 of my 3 problems are solved!

1. name server lookups, 2. problems with certain e-mail adresses:

-----------------------------------------------------------------

1. It turned out, that my /etc/aliases file was wrong. The entries for me

looked like this:

s.voss: stefan

stefan: stefan@HOSTNAME

Changing this to:

s.voss: stefan

stefan: stefan@HOSTNAME.terrdata.de

helped.

2. I had to change my /etc/resolv.conf to this:

search terradata.de

nameserver 192.76.144.66

Note, that the entry "order" is kicked off (the search order is maintained

by /etc/nsswitch.conf), and that "domain" was changed to "search".

3. In /etc/nsswitch.conf, I changed the entry for hosts to this:

hosts: nis dns

I tried that before, but it did not work, probably because of the wrong

alias file and the wrong resolv.conf.

One of the friendly helpers suggested, that "It sounds like your ISP does not

have an MX record defined for de.uu.net." I'm sure, they have, because (1) they

are one of the leading providers in germany, and (2) the same adress works fine

with sendmail 8.8.5 - the problem was not with the ISP, but with my

configuration.

Another one suggested running a caching only server to speed up name lookups -

sounds like a good idea. I will think about that, although this is not the

problem for mail which is destined to leave our domain, it doesn't matter

whether such a lookup takes 1 second or 5 in this case.

3. NIS:

-------

But one problem persists: my NIS master (which is still SunOS 4.1.3) supports a

map "mail.aliases" but not "aliases.nis". After I put the Solaris 2.5.1 NIS

client in NIS compatibility mode, sendmail did not complain any longer about the

unknown map. However, it does't care a bit for the contents of "mail.aliases" -

when I send mail to a a user XXX which is an alias pointing to me, a file

/var/spool/mail/XXX is created.

However, if I don't manage this, this will be no problem, because we have only

one mail server, and all people will run their mail tool on this machine (and

maybe a second machine if I overload the machine), so maintaining a local file

will not introduce much administrative overhead compared with maintaining one

NIS map.

Stefan

-- ORIGINAL POSTING: ----------------------------------------------------------

Hi list,

System: Solaris 2.5.1 HW 11/97 (SunOS isis 5.5.1 Generic_103640-12 sun4m

sparc SUNW,SPARCstation-10)

sendmail: 8.9.1, compiled with NIS and NEWDB support

1. When sending a mail locally inside our company, sendmail generates a name

server request. tcpdump doesn't show which name is looked up, unfortunately,

and I have not installed snoop.

10:16:29.920024 isis.53147 > ns.de.uu.net.domain: 42766+ (34) (DF)

10:16:32.110024 ns.de.uu.net.domain > isis.53147: 42766* 0/1/0 (112)

We don't have our own DNS server (that would be a bit oversized for a com-

pany like ours).

Our ISP says, that the name of the mail server must be present in /etc/

hosts. This is the case (of course, otherwise, I would have severe trouble),

but he has no experience with NIS or Solaris - they use LINUX (not bad, but

useless for me...). So I can't expect useful input from there and hence I

count on the collected wisdom of this list.

However, this name server request costs money. Our ISP says, that sendmail

needs to do this in order to check for correct adresses and prevent

relaying. Is this true ? Or can I stop this ? And how ?

2. When I send a mail to or ISP (e.g. mail@de.uu.net), I get the mail back:

> The original message was received at Wed, 10 Feb 1999 12:18:23 +0100 (MET)

> from

> ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----

> mail@de.uu.net

> ----- Transcript of session follows -----

> 550 mail@de.uu.net... Host unknown (Name server: de.uu.net: host not found)

Syslog shows this:

Feb 10 12:18:26 isis sendmail[1933]: MAA01931: to=mail@de.uu.net,

ctladdr=stefan (520/10), delay=00:00:03, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=esmtp,

relay=de.uu.net, stat=Host unknown (Name server: de.uu.net: host not found)

When I send mail to USER@hannover.geoquest.slb.com, it works fine.

The difference is: de.uu.net is just a domain name, but hannover.geoquest.

slb.com is a host name (which can be verified with traceroute).

This is my /etc/resolv.conf:

domain terradata.de

nameserver 192.76.144.66

order local, nis, bind

This is my /etc/nsswitch.conf:

passwd: files nis

group: files nis

hosts: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files

networks: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files

protocols: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files

rpc: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files

ethers: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files

netmasks: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files

bootparams: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files

publickey: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files

netgroup: nis

automount: files nis

aliases: files

services: files nis

sendmailvars: files

3. Using "aliases: files nis" in /etc/nsswitch.conf did not work, syslog

reported this:

/var/log/syslog.6:Dec 16 10:31:09 isis sendmail[274]: NOQUEUE: SYSERR(root):

Switch map aliases: unknown member map aliases.nis: No such file or

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sendmail 8.9.1 problems (NIS, DNS)

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