mail

neil · 03-10-2003, 05:28 AM

Hi,
Can anyone tell me the difference between sendmail and local mail? are they both used. Is sendmail used for local mail.
I have a Linux box with the sendmail service disabled and can still send local mail. In /var/log/maillog I get
Mar 10 09:53:52 <host> sendmail [12345]: <details>

On another standalone system the local mails do not work. In the maillog for this system I get in <details> "connection refused from localhost.localdomain", I get this for every mail I send. Thats why I've ended up here. any suggestions where to loook or better still anyone know why this does not work.
Regards, Neil.

neil · 03-10-2003, 03:17 PM

Well i got home and checked. I see that 16 people have read this probably 6 of them me.

Anyway, I checked the test mails I sent and they are all there. I also got a mail from the mailer Daemon sayng that it could not send the messages due to a timeout. Something to do with name resolution.

"The original message was received at Sun, 9 Mar 2003 10:29:06 GMT
from root@localhost

----- Transcript of session follows -----
451 127.0.0.1: Name server timeout
Warning: message still undelivered after 4 hours
Will keep trying until message is 5 days old

--h2AHndms001138.1047318581/zen.localhost"

There see name server timeout.

so how do I stop that?

my hosts file seems fine; nsswitch.conf says to check local files first.

Now I do have a file called /etc/resolv.conf but it is empty.
So my question is do I need anything in there. It gets populated with my isp nameservers when I dial up. So can I put anything in there to fix this or is it something else?
Help.
Regards

neil · 03-18-2003, 02:37 AM

I had the same problem on another machine. I fixed this by alteringing the line in the hosts file
to
x.x.x.x snoopy.localdomain snoopy
from
x.x.x.x snoopy

I also removed all entries the resolv.conf file.

And now the mail works immediately. I guess its not trying to use DNS to resolve the hostname.
So thats the name resolution problem solved, but what about my other machine that refuses the connection? all firewall rules were turned off with iptables -F.

So any ideas why this is happening?