Compound Problems
 

Hello Team,

I have what I originally thought was a problem with my sendmail configuration. The symptom was that I could send mail locally to accounts on the system, but I could not send or recieve mail over the net.

Now, I'm beginning to think this is more of a DNS problem. Additionally I'm getting odd errors on my login screen of all places. The error looks like;

216.52.86 sent an invalid ICMP error to a broadcast.

After a while these errors scroll off the screen, with different IP's. I've looked into this and this appears to be firewall related. However, when I set up this installation I set the firwall to "none" as I plan on installing a different one.

My DNS records are as follows;

$TTL 86400
@ IN SOA NS1.SPEAKEASY.NET. bselzler.sezonline.com. (
2 ; serial
28800 ; refresh
7200 ; retry
604800 ; expire
86400 ; ttl
)


@ IN NS NS1.SPEAKEASY.NET.
@ IN NS NS2.SPEAKEASY.NET.
@ IN NS ns.sezonline.com.

@ IN MX 10 ns.sezonline.com.

@ IN A 216.254.0.9
@ IN A 216.231.41.22
@ IN A 64.81.55.27

ftp IN CNAME ns.sezonline.com.
www IN A 64.81.55.27


And the reverse mapping file;

$TTL 86400
@ IN SOA NS1.SPEAKEASY.NET. bselzler@sezonline.com. (
2 ; serial
28800 ; refresh
7200 ; retry
604800 ; expire
86400 ; ttk
)


@ IN NS NS2.SPEAKEASY.NET.
@ IN NS ns.sezonline.com.

9.0.254.216 IN PTR NS1.SPEAKEASY.NET.
22.41.231.216 IN PTR NS1.SPEAKEASY.NET.
27 IN PTR ns.sezonline.com.


What follows here is part of this conversation on the webmin list. Hopefully it gives some more background on the problem;

> From: "Rodolfo"
> Reply-To: webadmin-list@lists.sourceforge.net
> Date: Sun, 09 Sep 2001 04:52:30 +0000
> To: <webadmin-list@lists.sourceforge.net>
> Subject: Re: sendmail..
>
> At 9/8/2001 09:10 PM -0700, Bruce Selzler wrote:
>> I commented out the "offending" line, ran "m4" on sendmail.mc, and restarted
>> sendmail. While I'm able to send and receive to users locally I still cant
>> send or receive via the network.
>
> Well, first I should comment that this is getting way off-topic for the
> Webmin list. But as long as no one minds, I'm in.
>
>> I did note that running the m4 command
>> produced no feedback of any kind. Just a brief pause and a return to the
>> command line. Should it say whether it was successful or not?
>
> It provides no feedback. What exact command did you run?


m4 sendmail.mc > /etc/sendmail.cf

>> For some reason mail sent to the system apparently goes nowhere, and when I
>> try to send mail out locally its getting put in the queue.
>>
>> In WebMin I see entries in the mail queue that all have the same "status";
>>
>> hostmap:lookup (mac.com):deferred
>
> This begins to look like a DNS problem. Can you post the zonefile for your
> domain?
>
>> I suspect I'm missing something really obvious here but I just can't see it.
>> I keep going over sendmail.mc as well as the Webmin module, but I admit I'm
>> clueless at this point.
>
> Please remember two things: one, webmin isn't intended to set up sendmail
> but rather to manage a working sendmail installation; and two, I'm no
> expert here. So I'll try to help, but I hope others will too, 'cause this
> is the blind leading the blind, man.