[ale] sendmail and /etc/resolv.conf

[Andrew Newton]

Christopher Fowler wrote:
> 
> On my system I have a /etc/resolv.conf and when I do
> host tf500 I get a response.  But when I use sendmail to
> send mail to any user on tf500 I get errors such as "host name
> lookup failure".  Why could it not look up the hostname if I'm
> able to do nslookup to the roght host.  If ne1 has any suggestions I
> would greatly appreciate it.

I believe that sendmail goes around the standard system calls like
gethostbyname() and uses DNS directly... and consequently never checks
a local hosts file.  And I believe this is done to get at those
precious MX records that name servers have.  This is just a guess, but
I've never been able to get sendmail to understand the hosts file.

-- 
 ------------------------------------------------------
 Andrew Newton
 Andrew.Newton at automatedlogic.com
 lfs at eskimo.com
 http://www.eskimo.com/~lfs
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