dce@Solbourne.COM (David Elliott) (04/22/89)
We are a site with only UUCP access to the outside world. We
registered our domain (solbourne.com) with UUNET fairly recently, using
nbires.nbi.com as our forwarding host.
Some people are able to send mail to people here as user@solbourne.com,
but this is not universally available. When I login to boulder
(boulder.colorado.edu) and try to send mail to dce@solbourne.com,
it doesn't know how to send it. If I send to xxx@nbires.nbi.com,
boulder connects to UUNET and sends the mail, which is what I
expect when I send to dce@solbourne.com.
I have been told that the problem is that there is no MX record
for us, but there is an NS record for us.
I was under the impression that sites were supposed to have a
forwarding host, who supposedly knows more about the world, that they
sent mail to if the route could not be determined (I know that this is
the case at MIPS and at Solbourne). In other words, when boulder can't
figure out how to send to solbourne.com, they are supposed to forward
the mail to CSNET-RELAY, who should have enough knowledge to know
to send the mail to UUNET or send it on to their forwarding host
(though I suppose it's reasonable to assume that CSNET-RELAY doesn't
have one).
What do we need to do to get things set up so that everyone can
send to us?
Also, does anyone out there have a sendmail.cf for SunOS 3.2 that
will send and receive general domain-style mail? We can't upgrade
our main machine to 4.0, and the base 3.2 sendmail.cf only forwards
ARPA and BITNET.
--
David Elliott dce@Solbourne.COM
...!{boulder,nbires,sun}!stan!dcefair@UCBARPA.BERKELEY.EDU (Erik E. Fair) (04/22/89)
In the referenced article, dce@Solbourne.com (David Elliott) writes: >We are a site with only UUCP access to the outside world. We >registered our domain (solbourne.com) with UUNET fairly recently, using >nbires.nbi.com as our forwarding host. That was your first mistake; your forwarder must be a real, honest to god Internet (with a capital "I") site (which is to say that I can open a TCP connection to them from anywhere else on the Internet). nbires.nbi.com isn't a real Internet site; they're just like you. >I have been told that the problem is that there is no MX record >for us, but there is an NS record for us. True. I checked with the nameserver here. >I was under the impression that sites were supposed to have a >forwarding host, who supposedly knows more about the world, that they >sent mail to if the route could not be determined (I know that this is >the case at MIPS and at Solbourne). Not quite. A forwarder is simply an Internet site that will accept mail for your domain, and forward it to you. All it has to be able to do is recognize your name as distinct from its own, and deliver whatever mail it accepted for your domain to you, by whatever means it likes (UUCP, FidoNET, carrier pigeon, etc). It must be an Internet site because the rest of the Internet wants to open a IP/TCP/SMTP connection to them to hand off any mail for your domain. UUCP sites route their mail (when they bother to route at all) in an entirely different manner than the Internet. >What do we need to do to get things set up so that everyone can >send to us? A UUCP neighbor who is an Internet site, and who is generous enough to be your forwarder. Find one, arrange it with them, and then tell UUNET what their fully qualified domain name is, so that UUNET can install the necessary MX records in your domain servers.