From owner-freebsd-isp Wed May 22 13:30:54 1996 Return-Path: owner-isp Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id NAA24232 for isp-outgoing; Wed, 22 May 1996 13:30:54 -0700 (PDT) Received: from pelican.altadena.net (pelican.altadena.com [206.16.90.21]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id NAA24223 for ; Wed, 22 May 1996 13:30:48 -0700 (PDT) Received: by pelican.altadena.net (Smail3.1.29.1 #10) id m0uMKYP-0000RhC; Wed, 22 May 96 13:30 PDT Message-Id: Date: Wed, 22 May 96 13:30 PDT From: pete@pelican.altadena.net (Pete Carah) To: isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: sendmail read errors/timeouts etc. In-Reply-To: Sender: owner-isp@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk In article you write: X.400 - booooo! >i have not discovered anything in common among the sites i'm having >trouble with (other than the fact that my box is having trouble with all >of them - hmm maybe that should tell me something %^) >i'm surprised that with all the folks that've had problems with this in >the various versions of freebsd over the last year that nobody really >nailed it down. i was gonna search the netbsd list archives but they >aren't as easy to get at as the freebsd archives are (no smurfy html >form - gotta go get 'em and grep through 'em) - i thought it'd be >interesting to find out if the netbsd'ers have experienced the same >difficulties. oh well, that'll be that bottom of the barrel strategy. Well, I have seen some systems (both Sun's and SGI's out of the box) that will send mail directly to a host if it has an A record even if there is an MX for the host (which is *supposed* to take precedence if present). I know that the OI line is part of the fix but don't know all. That can easily cause problems if the destination's nameserver is a messed-up firewall configuration that advertises A records for internal (unreachable) hosts (which is *very* common; I've helped several sites straighten this one out on the nameserver end). O'Reilly can come to the rescue here (at least if you can lift the sendmail book :-)) My gateway systems all run smail 3.1 which is *much* easier to configure, but we still need good sendmail.cf's (the FreeBSD default seems to work much better than both Sun's and SGI's defaults; the SGI default will often result in sendmail hitting the per-user process limit, at least in 4.0.5 and 5.2. At least Sun's default will *usually* send mail successfully even if it is usually unreplyable outside your own domain (uses @nodename instead of @fqdn, at least in 2.4 and 2.5, even to external destinations).) -- Pete