On Fri, 28 Feb 2003, Andreas Gietl wrote:
> First: you were right.
>
> There was an illegal element in the list:
>
> .61.130.22
Phew!
> But the question still remains, why does exim behave the way it does and deny
> the whole relay - and why doesn't it log the error. Should exim simply go on
> with the next entry in the list?
It should certainly log something about the failure to find the address
for the domain it thinks it is trying to look up. I have a note to
investigate this - in fact, it is now the next thing on my work list.
But is it an error? "61.130.22", for example, is a valid host name,
syntactically. (Blame a certain multinational whose name begins with a
digit for that mess.) Starting with a dot is perhaps more contentious.
What Exim actually does is to do a pattern match for an IP address; if
that fails, it treats the item as a host name.
However, if Exim finds a host name that it cannot look up, it cannot go
on with the next entry. Consider:
hosts = ! some.name : 10.9.0.0/16
If it cannot be sure that the host is not "some.name", it cannot
proceed. You can change this with +include_unkown (at the top level, not
in the file). But then it will always match unknown hosts instead of not
matching them. There isn't an option for "just skip this item".
Obviously there could be, but I suspect it would introduce even more
confusion into an area that already gives people difficulty.
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
