karl@naitc.naitc.com (Karl Denninger) (09/27/90)
We have an odd situation here. Right now we are not on the Internet directly. We do, however, have nameservice running here (which is nearly a necessity with 200+ sites in the domain!) and thus have the root records pointed back at ourselves (yes, it's crude, but it works -- somewhat). The problem comes in when we try to use BIND to determine where to send mail to. This is important because MX records are necessary for most of our hosts -- most of them don't know what SMTP is, and thus can't receive mail directly. For these machines we'd like to have the mail dropped at one specific machine, in this case a system called "nis.naitc.com". Now, I can put the MX records in there, and nslookup tells me I've done good. Smail3, however, has one problem with this. If I send mail to a site outside of our domain, I want it to default down to our smart-host entry (which is uunet) and end up going through uucp. This SHOULD work, or so I thought -- but smail3's BIND router says "heh, I can't figure out how to route this, and since BIND is authoritative for all domains, I'll just defer delivery -- forever". This isn't good! Is there something we can do with the nameserver configuration that returns a hard error (ie: no such domain in existance) rather than what we get right now (it equates to a "file not found"), or should we code around it in smail's BIND driver? Anyone else out there need to do this (or have done this)? Ideas? (Ps: Don't bother telling me we shouldn't be doing this -- we KNOW that to be the case. But we need a way, nonetheless, to have mail come into these "degenerate" hosts, some of which can do outbound SMTP but not inbound, and have it get somewhere sane). -- Karl Denninger AC Nielsen kdenning@ksun.naitc.com (708) 317-3285 Disclaimer: Contents represent opinions of the author; I do not speak for AC Nielsen on Usenet.