[comp.sys.hp] Sendmail problem in HP-UX 7.0

cph@zurich.ai.mit.edu (Chris Hanson) (10/18/90)

We've been experiencing a problem with sendmail in HP-UX 7.0, on both
series 300 and 800 machines.  Our hosts handle a large amount of mail
traffic, and at least 10 times a day we get errors like the following:

421 ksuvax1.cis.ksu.edu (tcp)... Deferred: Address family not supported by protocol family
550 danvy@ksuvax1.cis.ksu.edu... Host unknown: Address family not supported by protocol family

This error message is not only uninformative, but misleading.  In
fact, the problem seems to be that sendmail asked the nameserver for
the address of this host, and it timed out before the nameserver
responded.  Sendmail reacted to this by returning the mail to the
sender with an error message.

It seems to me that when sendmail times out waiting on the nameserver,
it should behave just as if the nameserver were not running.  In this
case, since the I option flag is set in the configuration file,
sendmail should defer the message.  This would solve the problem,
since usually these mail messages succeed if they are retransmitted.

In any case, this problem is causing many headaches for all of our
users.  If anyone has a solution, I'd appreciate it -- my only other
alternative is to find another mailer and use that instead, but I
don't want to be in the position of maintaining another mailer.

Kimmo.Suominen@lut.fi (Kimmo Suominen) (10/20/90)

>>>>> On 18 Oct 90 13:52:40 GMT, cph@zurich.ai.mit.edu (Chris Hanson) said:

Chris> In any case, this problem is causing many headaches for all of our
Chris> users.  If anyone has a solution, I'd appreciate it -- my only other
Chris> alternative is to find another mailer and use that instead, but I
Chris> don't want to be in the position of maintaining another mailer.

I've been using a Sendmail 5.61 + IDA 2.3 port ever since 3.10, which
didn't have Domain Name Service.  I also recall recompiling the
resolver library with a longer timeout period, because of many
timeouts (perhaps Finland is so far away).  However, timeouts don't
return mail to the sender, but leave it queued for the next queue run.
The error code shown on mailq is "Name Server Lookup Failure".

When I got HP-UX 7.0 I continued to use this ported Sendmail because
of it's IDA enhancements.  I had to recompile it, but I can't recall
whether I used the system resolver or the ported one (sorry).

You can get all this stuff from 

	a) nic.funet.fi [128.214.6.100] /pub/unix/hpux/network
	b) lut.fi       [128.214.25.8]  /unix/network

Fetch it preferably from nic.funet.fi, but you can use lut.fi, if you
can't reach nic.funet.fi for some strange reason.  Everything is set
up to compile on 3.10, but should compile on 7.0 as well.  I didn't
make any changes when recompiling.
--
Kim                      /  Internet: Kimmo.Suominen@lut.fi
"That's what I think."  /   Bitnet:   KIM@FINFILES