zazula@soliton.uucp (Ralph Zazula) (06/22/91)
Well, sometimes mail comes in and gets delivered fine. Other times it does not. Does anyone have incoming/outgoing mail working smoothly with SLIP on thier machine? I'd really like to get this pinned down. A friend of mine says that the version of "sendmail" that is on the NeXT is broken... It seems to work sometimes, however... Could someone detail the steps needed to get mail working reliably? So far, the only thing I've done is add a /etc/resolv.conf file that has my domain and a few nameserver machines listed. I'm running a NetInfo network with one machine (both / and .). Thanks, Ralph
eps@toaster.SFSU.EDU (Eric P. Scott) (06/22/91)
A dedicated SLIP connection is no different from any other IP technology. Dialup SLIP is another matter, since Internet mail delivery really wants continuous availability. For *outgoing* mail, the link will be set up on demand, so there's no problem here. For *incoming* mail, normally the sender-SMTP will attempt to connect to your IP address (which will work if your link is up, and fail if it's down), and reschedule failed deliveries for a later time. If the link is down every time a delivery's attempted, the mail will be bounced as undeliverable. The problem is simply that Dialup SLIP is generally unsuitable for server use; there's no way for incoming traffic to trigger a link up. This pretty much means that any system with a Dialup SLIP connection should have an MX record to some site that *will* be available to accept mail. The easiest thing to do at that point is probably to shove it into a UUCP queue, and have your machine poll for mail. (This doesn't necessarily mean UUCP-g; a port 540 approach would work too.) Note that if you have multiple MX records in order to receive mail "directly" if possible, incoming mail will arrive out-of-sequence. -=EPS=-
verket@venice.SEDD.TRW.COM (Paul Verket) (06/25/91)
In article <1991Jun21.182242.835@arizona.edu> zazula@soliton.uucp (Ralph Zazula) writes: >Well, sometimes mail comes in and gets delivered fine. Other times >it does not. Does anyone have incoming/outgoing mail working >smoothly >with SLIP on thier machine? I'd really like to get this pinned down. >A friend of mine says that the version of "sendmail" that is on the >NeXT is broken... It seems to work sometimes, however... I'm assuming that you're using a dialup slip connection that isn't up all the time. I'm in that situation and I changed sendmail.cf so my mail's "from" address is a (work) machine that _is_ on the net. I then either read replies at work or bounce the mail home while the slip connection is up. Let me know if you'd like to see my sendmail.cf file (and whether you can take nextmail) Paul Verket (NeXTmail)