louie@sayshell.umd.edu (Louis A. Mamakos) (09/05/90)
Has anyone else noticed problems with MX forwarding in sendmail? Here's the problem that I've had: In the DNS, there are some MX records for TRANTOR.UMD.EDU: TRANTOR.UMD.EDU IN MX 10 TRANTOR.UMD.EDU. IN MX 20 CAMELOT.UMD.EDU. Now, camelot is the Ultrix 4.0 machine. TRANTOR.UMD.EDU goes down over the weekend, so mail is delivered to CAMELOT.UMD.EDU. CAMELOT attempts delivery of the message, first trying TRANTOR, which of course fails since its down. It then opens a connected to itself, which is the problem. It should trim the list of MX forwarders to those with lower preferences than itself (and this indeed happens in the regular Berkeley 5.61 and some earlier versions). Funny thing is, this used to work just fine under Ultrix 3.something. Since we don't have sources yet (grr...) I installed the Berkeley sendmail. I'd like to run the Ultrix version with the Hesoid support, but this is a real problem which needs to be resolved. louie
marchany@vtserf.cc.vt.edu (Randy Marchany) (10/11/90)
In article <1990Sep5.134625.16191@ni.umd.edu> louie@sayshell.umd.edu (Louis A. Mamakos) writes: >Has anyone else noticed problems with MX forwarding in sendmail? Here's >the problem that I've had: > >In the DNS, there are some MX records for TRANTOR.UMD.EDU: > >TRANTOR.UMD.EDU IN MX 10 TRANTOR.UMD.EDU. > IN MX 20 CAMELOT.UMD.EDU. > >louie He goes on to state that whenever TRANTOR goes down, CAMELOT tries to deliver to TRANTOR and on failure, opens a 'connected to itself' which is the problem. Apparently, the list of MX forwarders is not trimmed to those with lower preferences than itself. This used to work on Ultrix 3.1. We've run into the same problem here at our site. I was looking thru comp.unix.ultrix for a response to the original note but couldn't find it. Does anyone what changed in sendmail (or whatever) between Ultrix versions? Thanks. -Randy Marchany INTERNET: marchany@vtserf.cc.vt.edu
jch@dyfed.rdg.dec.com (John Haxby) (10/12/90)
In article <412@vtserf.cc.vt.edu>, marchany@vtserf.cc.vt.edu (Randy Marchany) writes: |> In article <1990Sep5.134625.16191@ni.umd.edu> louie@sayshell.umd.edu (Louis A. Mamakos) writes: |> >Has anyone else noticed problems with MX forwarding in sendmail? Here's |> >the problem that I've had: |> > |> >In the DNS, there are some MX records for TRANTOR.UMD.EDU: |> > |> >TRANTOR.UMD.EDU IN MX 10 TRANTOR.UMD.EDU. |> > IN MX 20 CAMELOT.UMD.EDU. |> > |> >louie |> |> He goes on to state that whenever TRANTOR goes down, CAMELOT tries to |> deliver to TRANTOR and on failure, opens a 'connected to itself' which is |> the problem. Apparently, the list of MX forwarders is not trimmed to |> those with lower preferences than itself. This used to work on Ultrix |> 3.1. |> |> We've run into the same problem here at our site MX records work without any problems in V4, provided that you don't that an MX record for a host doesn't include itself :-( However, the good news is that the reason for this is that the $w macro is defined to be the unqualified name of the host (eg TRANTOR) instead of the FQDN (eg TRANTOR.UMD.EDU) -- the solution is to define $w to be the FQDN explicitly in the sendmail config file; this, of course, may throw up problems in the config file because it assumes that $w is unqualified. -- -- John Haxby Digital <jch@wessex.rdg.dec.com> Reading, England <...!ukc!wessex!jch>