I would like to send mail from a local account on one machine in my network to another machine in my network without having to go out to the internet and back.
i.e. I would like to send mail from ron@sisu to ron@ronlt

/etc/hosts contains:
#
# hosts This file describes a number of hostname-to-address
# mappings for the TCP/IP subsystem. It is mostly
# used at boot time, when no name servers are running.
# On small systems, this file can be used instead of a
# "named" name server.
# Syntax:
#
# IP-Address Full-Qualified-Hostname Short-Hostname
#

127.0.0.1 nil

# special IPv6 addresses
::1 localhost ipv6-localhost ipv6-loopback

fe00::0 nil

ff00::0 nil
ff02::1 nil
ff02::2 nil
ff02::3 nil
127.0.0.2 sisu.sparks.endoftheinternet.org sisu
192.168.1.69 sisu sisu
192.168.1.11 brendaws.sparks.endoftheinternet.org brendaws
192.168.1.80 noodle.sparks.endoftheinternet.org noodle
192.168.1.80 ronlt

The error message I get back from Sendmail is:
This is the mail system at host sisu.sparks.endoftheinternet.org.

I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not
be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below.

For further assistance, please send mail to postmaster.

If you do so, please include this problem report. You can
delete your own text from the attached returned message.

* * * * * * * * * *The mail system

<ron@ronlt.sparks.endoftheinternet.org> (expanded from <ron@ronlt>): unable to
* * look up host ronlt.sparks.endoftheinternet.org: Name or service not known

The system is behind a linksys WRT54GS router to connect all machines, hardwire and wifi. There is no 'central' server.

The operating systems used are openSuse 11.1 and 11.0.

I recall something from the '80s about uumail, but I'm sure there's a better solution available today.

How to I get sendmail to go directly to the target machine i.p. address (i.e. 192.168.1.11) without all the expansion.

Also, I would like to forward system mail from the other machines all to one user on one machine (i.e. root@ronlt, root@brendaws to ron@sisu)

Note local mail (ron@sisu to ron@sisu) seems to work OK.

Hi, welcome to the LQ forums.

OK, there are several questions here:

1. "ronlt.sparks.endoftheinternet.org" is not written in your hosts file. Also, I am not sure you are allowed to double IP addresses. You should have one IP and list of hostnames. like this:

I think this should work.

For your other questions, it would be best to set up mail server on one machine and point all others on that one.

I think I figured it out.
I went into yast on the target machine and configured the Mail Transfer Agent. That installed a few packages I had apparently needed.