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Date:      07 Mar 2002 12:12:32 +0100
From:      Simon J Mudd <sjmudd@pobox.com>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: sendmail and dns
Message-ID:  <86g03cljhb.fsf@unicorn.ea4els.ampr.org>
In-Reply-To: <0B0368CED76DD4118E1200D0B73E9B5D041E9F20@MAIL1>
References:  <0B0368CED76DD4118E1200D0B73E9B5D041E9F20@MAIL1>

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Dewhirst.M@UCLES.org.uk (Mike Dewhirst) writes:

> Sometimes my box (4.4) can't send mails because the relay server it connects
> to can't reverse look it up.
> 
> As in:
> 
> I have a domain called mydomain.com.
> I have a box called mybox.mydomain.com.
> I have a A record in my ISP's zone file for mybox.mydomain.com
> I can not resolve mybox.mydomain.com to an ip.
> 
> Should mybox.mydomain.com be a CNAME record?

No. Sendmail is probably doing a reverse lookup from your ip address
to find out your name.  This is what normally goes in the logs.

So if you box is called
mybox.mydomain.com and has an A record 1.2.3.4

Then the DNS should have two records, ideally:

mybox.mydomain.com      IN A    1.2.3.4
4.3.2.1.in-addr.arpa.   IN PTR  mybox.mydomain.com.

The ptr record may show something different and it is probably this
which is wrong.

If you want to check the forward record do:

dig @ns.of.provider     A       mybox.mydomain.com
dig @ns.of.provider     PTR     4.3.2.1.in-addra.arpa.

If that works, but it fails when you remove the @ns.of.provider
then they have setup the DNS locally correctly but globally the
information is not being propogated to the rest of the Internet.

However it sounds like a local issue which may fail globally too.

I think that sendmail if it can't resolve the name from the ip address
shouldn't fail. Perhaps you have some sort of tcp timeout which is
being triggered "during the wait"?

Without real names, addresses, logs and configuration files it's
pretty hard to know.

Simon
--
Simon J Mudd,   Tel: +34-91-408 4878,  Mobile: +34-605-085 219
Madrid, Spain.  email: sjmudd@pobox.com,  Postfix RPM Packager

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