Hopefully someone else has looked at this before .....
I am trying to use sendmail for amprnet email. Eventually I would like to
handle all mail on the same machine, but for now just amprnet will suffice.
Sendmail as it comes configured with Redhat just doesn't work because
amprnet addresses in general do not have MX record in the dns, and sendmail
quite correctly requires these for internet use.
I run a local caching DNS server, connected to a fully connected local node,
this would seem to work fine.
To get around the MX problem, I have changed the mailer definition for all
smtp mailers to ignore MX records (a leading 0 in the flags), this works
fine for addresses in my local hosts file, but not for others.
I have changed the ResolverOptions macro to -AAONLY -DNSRCH -RECURSE.
If I try to send mail it gets bounced back as unknown address, if I
change -RECURSE to +RECURSE then the mail sits in the outbound queue, and
never goes. Also with this configuration I see a DNS query go out and reply
come back, this looks like it's trying an MX lookup.
If I now try to ping the host in question, I see another DNS query go out
and get a reply before the ping starts, so an A record has not yet been
resolved.
If I now try to send mail, with the A record now having been resolved, the
mail goes. It also goes with -RECURSE (as above), again only if I have
forced a lookup for the A record before sendmail attempts to send.
Anyone have any ideas to make sendmail work without MX records, but still
use DNS ?, I'm sure other amprnet sites must have come up with a solution.
Running kernel 2.0.31 (Redhat 5.1), Sendmail 8.8.7 and named 4.9.7. b.t.w.
Thanks in advance - Max France (G4FDL)
