[CentOS] Sendmail, mailertable and DNS weirdness.

Wed Jun 21 10:54:32 UTC 2006
Fabian Arrotin <fabian.arrotin at arrfab.net>

I've installed a lot of Sendmail/MailScanner smtp relays on CentOS and
i've never encountered a problem like this ...
I manipulate the mailertable and i issue 
makemap hash /etc/mail/mailertable < /etc/mail/mailertable
to reconstruct the mailertable.
The difference i have is that i don't use ip address but hostnames in
the mailertable :
domain.org    smtp:[central.domain.org]

Of course central.domain.org is not an official A record but just a
entry in my /etc/hosts file (to avoid dns resolution) ...

On Wed, 2006-06-21 at 11:23 +0100, Will McDonald wrote:
> Guys,
> 
> I've had a weird problem with Sendmail misbehaving in a way I don't
> really understand. I've worked round the problem but I'd like to
> understand what was going on.
> 
> The MX for one of our domains, blah.com, pointed at an internal
> Exchange server. Mail relayed to a Sendmail MailScanner which then
> delivered to Exchange for this domain. The domain expired leading to
> all its mail queueing in Sendmail. So far so sensible.
> 
> While waiting for the domain to be renewed I setup a mailertable entry
> to bypass DNS and route mail directly to the Exchange server...
> 
> blah.com  smtp:[192.168.10.10]
> 
> I rebuilt mailertable then tried flushing the queue with...
> 
> sendmail -q -v -qRblah
> 
> ... which resulted in a bunch of "Transient parse error -- message
> queued for future delivery" errors due to DNS resolution failure.
> 
> I thought mailertable entries bypassed DNS? Does Sendmail cache the
> state of the destination for queued messages somehow? In the
> qf${msgid} files in the spool?
> 
> I tried restarting MailScanner (and hence both Sendmail processes),
> same problem. I read (
> http://www.sendmail.org/~ca/email/doc8.12/op-sh-3.html ) that Sendmail
> can, when configured with HostStatusDirectory enabled, retain
> information on the status of hosts on disk but "sendmail -bh" returned
> nothing and "sendmail -bH", just in case, didn't help either.
> 
> So, was mailertable being bypassed because these messages had already
> been attempted to be delivered before the mailertable changes? Anyone
> know what was going on here? I worked around it by just setting up a
> quick zone for blah.com with an MX in it but I'd like to understand
> WTF was going on with mailertable for future reference.
> 
> Will.
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-- 
Fabian Arrotin <fabian.arrotin at arrfab.net>
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