[TriLUG] help! weird sendmail problem

[Jason Tower]

unless you are using RR business class, i don't think RR is going to give
what you want.  assuming your user/account name is paloverde, that doesn't
mean that your IP address maps to paloverde.nc.rr.com.  next time you're
at home, try hitting checkip.dyndns.org in a browser, this will tell you
your public IP address and the reverse resolution DNS name.  in my case (i
have earthlink cable service, very similar to RR), my 'DNS' name is:

Current IP Address: 24.136.143.105
Hostname: user-0c8h3r9.cable.mindspring.com

obviously not a very user-friendly DNS name.  note that if you resolve
cerient.net (my domain name that i host from home) you will get my IP
listed above.  if that's what you want, you'll need a dynamic DNS account
which you can get for free from dyndns.org.  then you could have
paloverde.dyndns.org always point to your RR IP address.  so when you send
email from your house to lucent, they can reverse resolve your domain name
in to the actual IP address the mail came from, and accept your mail

i think there was a fairly long thread about dynamic DNS a week or so ago,
you might want to check out the archives for more info.

jason

>
> The Facts:
> Red Hat 7.1
> sendmail-8.11.2-14
> connected to my cable modem (outside interface)
> connected to my small networks serving 1 pc (in case RR is listening)
> (inside interface).
>
> My outside interface appears to NOT be able to resolve it's domain name.
>  I think this is a RR wide thing.  Is anyone running RR able to get a
> resolvable DNS name on the Roadrunner interface on the RR network?  If
> so how?  For instance, the command (issued from my linux box at work)
> 'dig paloverde.nc.rr.com' does not return an ip address.  Does
> Roadrunner just not update DNS entries or simply not support DNS for
> it's DHCP connected devices?
>
> My real question is this:
>
> Because my outside interface is not DNS resolvable some mail servers
> will not accept mail send from my box, an example of this is my
> employer, Lucent. Saturday, a day which I was not even in town, my mail
> server attempted to send mail to my work address 6480 times!!!  And it's
> been doing this every stinking day.
>
> Upon noticing this I freaked out, then stopped sendmail.  I looked in
> /var/spool/mail and sure enough, there were references to lucent.com in
> the three files in this directory.  I deleted every file in this
> directory then restarted sendmail thinking this would stop the mail from
> going out which had not already been delivered.
>
> No luck.  My machine is still attempting to mail lucent.com and the
> files in /var/spool/mail are still empty.
>
> Any ideas on where to look to get rid of the files that is causing this?
>
> Here's an example of what is showing up in my maillog:
> 4:03:18 paloverde sendmail[16406]: g95G0GT14652: to=gwbrown1 at lucent.com,
> ctladdr=root (0/0), delay=16:03:02, xdelay=00:00:18, mailer=esmtp,
> pri=86730161, relay=ihemail2.lucent.com. [192.11.222.163], dsn=4.0.0,
> stat=Deferred: ihemail2.lucent.com.: No route to host
>
> Thanks!!!
>
> Greg
>
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------------------------
Jason Tower
Cerient Technologies
jason at cerient.net