Re: [exim-dev] Exim doesn't look in /etc/hosts when /etc/re…

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Author: Ted Cooper
Date:  
To: exim-dev
Subject: Re: [exim-dev] Exim doesn't look in /etc/hosts when /etc/resolv.conf empty
On 11/06/10 23:27, Jörg Sommer wrote:
> I've a smarthost in my local network named server.localnet. It's name is
> resolvable via /etc/hosts; ping works. But there's no DNS server
> available, hence /etc/resolv.conf is empty. With this setting exim
> doesn't feed mails to the smarthost. See
> http://alioth.debian.org/~jo-guest/exim-failure-debug.out
>
> But when I set a DNS server that surely doesn't know about
> server.localnet, exim looks at /etc/hosts, resolves the name and delivers
> the mail.


I'm not too well versed on what is needed for a working resolver stub on
your system but /etc/resolv.conf having something valid in it would
normally be a requirement for it to work at all. As such, this sounds
like a resolver config error while exim is doing what any program faced
with this situation should do. It's not second guessing the resolver
library.

If you want to run your system without any name servers listed in
resolv.conf, you will need to tell host.conf not to look there. I'm
guessing that it will fail lookups when one of the methods is invalid.

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