Re: [Exim] Configuration question

On 2001-11-15 at 05:20 -0500, Norman Walsh wrote:
> / Phil Pennock <Phil.Pennock@???> was heard to say:
> [...]
> | "exim -d9" + other options will reveal a lot of debugging info.
>
> Thank you. Problem solved. I don't know if this is a bug or not, but
> what happened was that exim attempted to lookup the 'localhost' that
> local_rsmtp specified:

Eurgh!

> using the transport's hosts: localhost
> getting address for localhost
> DNS lookup of localhost (MX) succeeded
> fully qualified name = localhost.MYEMPLOYER.com
> host_find_bydns yield = HOST_FOUND (2); returned hosts:
> saturn.MYEMPLOYER.COM 192.9.25.2 5 511
> lukla.MYEMPLOYER.COM 192.18.98.31 5 512
> patan.MYEMPLOYER.COM 192.18.98.43 5 519
> venus.MYEMPLOYER.COM 192.9.25.5 5 589
> mercury.MYEMPLOYER.COM 192.9.25.1 15 1515
> mondzo.MYEMPLOYER.COM 192.18.100.1 40 4038
> mars.MYEMPLOYER.COM 192.9.22.1 40 4053
> checking status of saturn.MYEMPLOYER.COM
>
> Changing hosts=localhost to hosts=127.0.0.1 fixed that problem and now
> deliver works as expected.

You'll have problems elsewhere, in other applications.

The relevant line from the Router was:
route_list = "MYEMPLOYER.com localhost byname"

"byname" says to use the gethostbyname() call, which will be asking the
OS libraries what they think the name is. This allows use of
/etc/hosts, NIS+/YP/etc maps, DNS, and any sick cruft anyone cares to
hack in.

As an administrative matter, it's generally wise to have /etc/hosts
contain a few essential items, eg:
127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.MYEMPLOYER.com
any then have your system look in /etc/hosts before performing DNS
lookups. This will be controlled by things like:
/etc/resolv.conf "lookup file bind" on BSDish systems
/etc/nsswitch.conf "hosts: files dns" on SysV (including GNU/Linux) systems
--
Libertes philosophica.