Sendmail problem

[Kevin Cummings]

On 08/06/2014 11:27 AM, Tim wrote:
> On Tue, 2014-08-05 at 10:37 -0400, Kevin Cummings wrote:
>> Starting at some point during the day on July 30, my outgoing emails
>> have been queueing up on my Fedora 19 server with some strange messages:
>>
>>> # mailq
>>> 		/var/spool/mqueue (1 request)
>>> -----Q-ID----- --Size-- -----Q-Time----- ------------Sender/Recipient-----------
>>> s75EJYwb013189*    3981 Tue Aug  5 10:19 <cummings at kjchome.homeip.net>
>>>                  (Deferred: Connection refused by localhost.localdomain.homeip)
>>> 					 <recipient at gmail.com>
>>> 		Total requests: 1
> 
> Are you using domain names that you own?  Is there a DNS entry that
> points to someone else's IPs?

My domain is dynamic DNS, owned by Dyn DNS, but "allocated to me".  In
that regard, I own kjchome.homeip.net (I pay for its use).  If you do a
DNS lookup on it, you will find the IP address allocated to me (via
DHCP) by my ISP.

> Foggy memory, here, but sendmail may be looking up MX records to work
> out where to send mail, and if there is a public record that doesn't
> relate to your own IPs, things could be messy.  The hosts file cannot do
> MX records.  You'd need to configure sendmail to know that certain
> domains are local.

Just my subdomain kjchome.homeip.net is local, the rest of the domain
homeip.net is external.

> Email can be rather painful when you're using host files, I use a local
> DNS server which has a configuration set into it for all local machines
> in the same manner as is traditional for setting up real public IPs
> (e.g. forward and reverse look-ups, A names for machines, CNAMES for any
> aliases, MX records).

I could not get the files to flush until I added
localhost.localdomain.kjchome.homeip.net to my /etc/hosts file under
127.0.0.1.  After I added this alias, "sendmail -q" now sends those
emails out.  My question was 2 fold:

	1)  why the ridiculous looking combined FQDN
	2)  why won't sendmail send these out without the explicit
            "sendmail -q"

> 
>> And why is localhost.localdomain being prepended to my local domain
>> name in the mqueue?
> 
> When there are multiple answers for domain names (host files, or DNS),
> it's typically the first one that becomes the answer.

My /etc/host.conf file contains 1 line:

multi on

My /etc/resolv.conf contains 3 nameserver lines:

nameserver 192.168.6.94			; My server
nameserver 192.168.6.1			; My router
nameserver 8.8.8.8			; Google


> e.g. with the following in /etc/hosts
> 
> 127.0.0.1  localhost  localhost.localdomain something.example.com
> 127.0.0.1  blah.example.com
> 
> All those domain names and hostnames have the 127.0.0.1 IP.  But if
> something asks what's the name for 127.0.0.1, the answer will be just
> "localhost".
> 

Interesting, localhost.localdomain is the first name on that line....

Should I change it such that localhost is first?

Why is this only broken recently?  What changed on or about July 30????
I may go back to having my iPhone just use my ISP's email server
directly instead of using my own server (which of course send all of its
outgoing mail to my ISP).

-- 
Kevin J. Cummings
kjchome at verizon.net
cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
cummings at kjc386.framingham.ma.us
Registered Linux User #1232 (http://www.linuxcounter.net/)