On Sun, Jul 22, 2007 at 04:42:03PM -0700, Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade wrote:
> On Jul 22, 2007, at 1:48 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> > Jul 20 02:50:23 sonya sendmail[17098]: l6K773ef017008:
> > to=<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
> > ctladdr=<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (501/501),
> > delay=02:43:00, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=relay,
> > pri=330573, relay=orngca-mls06.dc.rr.com, dsn=4.0.0,
> > stat=Deferred: Name server: orngca-mls06.dc.rr.com:
> > host name lookup failure
> >{RR DNS still down; can't resolve kernel-panic.org?}
> >
> > Jul 20 03:49:34 sonya sendmail[17103]: l6K773ef017008:
> > to=<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
> > ctladdr=<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (501/501),
> > delay=03:42:11, xdelay=00:00:06, mailer=relay,
> > pri=420573, relay=orngca-mls06.dc.rr.com. [66.75.160.20],
> >dsn=2.0.0,
> > stat=Sent (l6KBGeIF013120 Message accepted for delivery)
> >{Message finally reaches RR.}
>
> These last two messages are really the significant ones. You're
> close in your analysis, but not quite spot on. the DNS failure is on
> your machine, when attempting to look up the next-hop mail server,
> which happens to be the one provided to you by RR. Very
> specifically, the first message says "This message is deferred
> because the name server couldn't find 'orngca-mls06.dc.rr.com'."
>
> The second message you list here is when everything works again.
>
> So, there's two possibilities for the problem. One, is that your DNS
> server is occasionally not working. This doesn't seem very likely,
> because you'd notice it in a lot of other ways. (Connections to
> anything would fail or take a long time to succeed due to DNS
> timeouts or failures).
>
> The other possibility is that the specific server that you've
> configured your sendmail to relay mail through was temporarily not
> listed in DNS. This may happen if RR is rotating servers in or out
> of service, and you're telling sendmail to point to a specific mail
> server instead of a generic service name (like Cox uses
> "smtp.west.cox.net".)
>
> How do you have sendmail configured to send outbound mail?
The specific server possibility sounds like the right one.
My /etc/mail/sendmail.mc contains the line
(shown broken; actually contains "com')dnl" )
define(`SMART_HOST',`orngca-mls06.dc.rr.com')
dnl [scs 03c17][was 03803,02b05]
I'm not sure anymore but I think this line configures outbound mail.
1. How do I determine the generic server names? I might need advice
to navigate the RR help web pages using lynx. The last time
I tried navigating them I had difficulty.
2. I really would rather use qmail or postfix than sendmail, but
I don't want to lose my configuration, which includes forcing my
From_ and From: lines to be my RR email address. Without special
effort they used to wind up being addresses that only are meaningful on
my own workstation. From_ was difficult, but years ago it was
common, IIRC, to reject mail where that address was anything unexpected.
You can see what I had to do at
www.speakeasy.org/~straits/kp_sma01509a.txt .
(BTW, sendmail on my workstation is an Elf binary and so doesn't
seem to be an alias for qmail or postfix.)
Thanks
Stewart Strait
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