[comp.sys.att] Mail Problems on 3B2/600

chim@eceimg.ncsu.edu (Bill Chimiak) (02/15/90)

When sending mail on my 3B2/600 using mail or mailx, if the machine
cannot find it (I imagine in /etc/hosts), the mail comes back.  Now one
solution is for me to duplicate the /etc/hosts table on our reginal
nameserver.  This would be quite taxing on our machines resources.  A
more desireable solution would be to use a NAMESERVER mechanism as
Berkeley-like systems provide.

The proceedure I would like is the following:
 o send email to user@destination.whatever
 o if destination.whatever is not in my host table, the email is then
   forwarded to the NAMESERVER
 o the NAMESERVER then sends the email to destination.whatever.

Also required is the response from user@destination.whatever to return
to my 3B2/600.  One could do the following:  If one had a machine
on one's network, smart_machine, that had access to a NAMESERVER mechanism,
then sending email to user@destination.whatever@smart_machine would
easily get mail out but cause intermittent problems receiving replies.

Has someone solved this problem?

Thanks in advance.

fmcgee@cuuxb.ATT.COM (~XT6561110~Frank McGee~C23~L25~6326~) (02/20/90)

In article <1990Feb15.153534.23100@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu> chim@eceimg.ncsu.edu (Bill Chimiak) writes:
>When sending mail on my 3B2/600 using mail or mailx, if the machine
>cannot find it (I imagine in /etc/hosts), the mail comes back.  Now one
>solution is for me to duplicate the /etc/hosts table on our reginal
>nameserver.  This would be quite taxing on our machines resources.  A
>more desireable solution would be to use a NAMESERVER mechanism as
>Berkeley-like systems provide.

I believe WIN 3.0 products have this functionality.  I
remember that when I loaded both the 3B and 386 products they
ask you if you want to load the name server software.
However, I believe it checks the nameserver FIRST, since when
I installed the name server software and didn't administer it
telnet and rlogin waited for the nameserver to time out (about 30
seconds) before checking /etc/hosts.

Hope this was what you were looking for,

-- 
Frank McGee, AT&T
Entry Level Systems Support
attmail!fmcgee (preferred)
att!cuuxb!fmcgee (those that can't reach attmail)