hi ,
my dns work properly... but could not send mail through sendmail...
following r the details ... i have not made any changes to sendmail.cf after installation....

[root@chetan ~]# nslookup chetan.abc.net
Server: 127.0.0.1
Address: 127.0.0.1#53

Name: chetan.abc.net
Address: 192.168.0.1
--------------------------------------------------------------
[root@chetan ~]# nslookup nikhil.abc.net
Server: 127.0.0.1
Address: 127.0.0.1#53

Name: nikhil.abc.net
Address: 192.168.0.3
--------------------------------------------------------------
# sendmail -v root@nikhil.abc.net < send
root@nikhil.abc.net... Connecting to 127.0.0.1 via relay...
220 chetan.abc.net ESMTP Sendmail 8.13.1/8.13.1; Fri, 18 Mar 2005 13:32:51 +0530
>>> EHLO chetan.abc.net
250-chetan.abc.net Hello localhost127.0.0.1 , pleased to meet you
250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
250-PIPELINING
250-8BITMIME
250-SIZE
250-DSN
250-ETRN
250-AUTH DIGEST-MD5 CRAM-MD5
250-DELIVERBY
250 HELP
>>> MAIL From:<root@chetan.abc.net> SIZE=7 AUTH=root@chetan.abc.net
250 2.1.0 <root@chetan.abc.net>... Sender ok
>>> RCPT To:<root@nikhil.abc.net>
>>> DATA
250 2.1.5 <root@nikhil.abc.net>... Recipient ok
354 Enter mail, end with "." on a line by itself
>>> .
250 2.0.0 j2I82pfA003809 Message accepted for delivery
root@nikhil.abc.net... Sent (j2I82pfA003809 Message accepted for delivery)
Closing connection to 127.0.0.1
>>> QUIT
221 2.0.0 chetan.abc.net closing connection
--------------------------------------------------------------------
[root@chetan ~]# mailq
/var/spool/mqueue (1 request)
-----Q-ID----- --Size-- -----Q-Time----- ------------Sender/Recipient-----------
j2I82pfA003809 7 Fri Mar 18 13:32 <root@chetan.abc.net>
(Deferred: Connection refused by nikhil.abc.net.)
<root@nikhil.abc.net>
Total requests: 1
------------------------------------------------------------


is this some problem with relaying........the domain name is abc.net
and hosts are chetan and nikhil.....
help of any kind will be highly appreciated .....
bye

---Deferred: Connection refused by nikhil.abc.net---

Have you commented out the "daemon_options" line in sendmail.mc?

What happens when you
telnet nikhil.abc.net 25

i have removed that 127.0.0.1 thing that disables listening on network interfaces.......(only loopback )....and changed it to 192.168.0.1...(the lan card)
however same problem continues ...except that ...sendmail directly gives deferred:connection refused....
i.e we dont need to see mailq to see connection refused anymore!
please help

Have you checked out nikhil's access file? Maybe you could try commenting that line completely out instead of changing it to 192.168.0.1. Did you comment that out on nikhil as well?

Does the email you get back have a specific error number? 55x?

You should perform the nslookups on nikhil as well since it is the one doing the rejecting.

verify that the ip address you want to relay mail from is listed in the server's /etc/mail/access file. i want to relay from anywhere on my home directory, and from my computer at work. so mine looks like this:

192.168.1 RELAY
63.201.98.110 RELAY

then you have to cd /etc/mail and run make, then restart sendmail.