Linux and MS Exchange interoperability

[Kevin Darcy]

peter at technical-reality.com wrote:

> I have a vanilla sendmail installation on Red Hat 7.0 on domain
> alpha.beta.edu .  Call the nameserver "ns-alpha".
>
> A larger domain is beta.edu where users are happily managed by
> Microsoft Exchange.  They can send email anywhere on the Internet.
> Call the Exchange server "ex-gamma".
>
> My problem is how to allow the fewer users on the "Linux domain"
> alpha.beta.edu to be able to send email to the people on
> gamma.beta.edu .
>
> Putting in a line in ns-alpha such as:
> beta.edu        IN      MX      ex-gamma.
> does not work.

Certainly that does not work the way you have written it: there is no
"ex-gamma" name in the root zone, so I doubt that you wanted that
trailing period. Also, unless this line is in the beta.edu zonefile with
a "$ORIGIN ." preceding it, the "beta.edu" owner name is almost
certainly going to get misinterpreted -- without a trailing period,
it'll get the default origin appended to it, so you're likely to end up
with an abomination like "beta.edu.beta.edu." or something like that.

Real names would have helped here.

Presumably, the beta.edu afolks already have published MX records on the
Internet that would allow any reasonable mailserver on the Internet to
route mail to them, so I'm not sure why you're even having a problem;
you shouldn't even have to add anything to any of your zonefiles unless
you happen to already be master for beta.edu.

My guess is, if you're having problems sending mail to that domain, it's
probably because your "vanilla" sendmail configuration jumps to the
conclusion that all mail for the SLD (second-level domain, e.g. beta.edu
in your example) is local. You might have to customize it slightly to
deal with being a gateway for only a third-level domain. This is a
sendmail configuration issue, and technically off-topic for this list.


- Kevin