Re: [Exim] strange failure to lookup IP address

On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 12:26:14PM +0100, Philip Hazel said:
> On Wed, 30 Jul 2003, Tom Davidson wrote:
>
> > Why does exim's default behaviour seem to be to do a DNS lookup rather than
> > obey the OS lookup settings (eg. the hosts setting in /etc/nsswitch.conf on
> > Solaris)? Is this because most installations of Exim will be talking
> > directly to the Internet and so can use MX records?
>
> Yes. Exim is an MTA for delivering mail over the Internet. It kind of expects
> to be connected to the Internet... :-)
>
> [In this case it isn't looking for MX records, but for A records.]
>
> > Still would have thought it would use the OS settings, but could be
> > forced otherwise...
>
> It's the other way round.

Of course another option is to setup a local DNS server. You don't NEED
to be connected to the internet to use DNS, and everything else just
seems to work better too.

I've actually been playing quite a bit with some exim configurations. I
setup a virtual network with VMWare where I have several virtual linux
machines with domain names like "domain1.test" "domain2.test" and such.
Since I just setup these ".test" TLD's in my "local use only" name
server, every machine on the lan can be involved with these not-real
domains.