sendmail

[Jim Reid]

>>>>> "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! 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....

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?