[Exim] Exim and SCO OpenServer resolvers

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Author: Tony Earnshaw
Date:  
To: exim-users
Subject: [Exim] Exim and SCO OpenServer resolvers
This is no cry for help, but just to put on the record something that might help someone sometime :-)

It is SCO OpenServer-specific, but could apply to any Unix, I suppose.

A litlle while ago, Roman Milner had resolver problems, with which this group did its best to help him. This
week I had exactly the same symptoms as he, but the cause was not the same. Exim 3.16 was to replace MMDF on
an Internet mail server.

I've installed Exim on many SCO machines, both UnixWare and OpenServer (OS) 5.0.x for many years. Never had
any trouble, until this week. Exim 3.16 compiled with gcc 2.9.5 on an OS 5.0.5 and installed on a 5.0.4
machine could not resolve Internet host names. Bind 4.9.7 was working o.k. - had no problems.

I've had enough experience with Exim and Bind to know that it had to be be a resolver problem. It turned out
that the libsocket.so.1 (that SCO uses on OpenServer) on the 5.0.5 machine used for compiling the Exim binary
was not compatible with the one on the 5.0.4 machine on which the binary was to be installed.

Replacing the 5.0.4 dynamic library with the 5.0.5 one solved the problem, but it cost hours of tentative
probing. Also, I was dead scared of ruining a perfectly good mail server. But, all went well and the mmdf/Exim
conversion complete.

With the inevitable demise of OpenServer pending SCO's server-system acquisition by Caldera, this might well
be academic, but who knows? Personally, my choice of OS for almost all new MTA machines is RedHat Linux!

Tony

--

Landis ICT Services, Unix Group

Tony Earnshaw

mailto:tearnshaw@landis.nl
tel.: +31 30 248 9198
fax: +31 30 241 22 42
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