Thank Jim Dennis for an in-depth answer.
I tried it and read the FAQ, and have a limping mail system.
I had to change the FROM_HEADER to get the ISP to accept the mail
because genericstable was ignored. Also, all incoming mail gets routed
to root! Have added sendmail.cw, used genericstable/virtusertable, and
userdb.
Both fetch and sendmail need a better configuration. I will layout my
ideal system, and hope or the best.
Five local users have seperate ISP accounts (1 on mindspring, 1 on
earthlink, 3 on seeyouonline):
LOCAL ISP ADDRESS
---------------------
jb on service@earthlink.net
john on johnjjg1@mindspring.com
guest1 on guest1rc4@seeyouonline.com
guest2 on guest2rc4@seeyouonline.com
rc4bob on rc4bob@seeyouonline.com
Local machine is heir.sea.com, and all should be able to send/receive
their own mail.
--- "L.U.S.T List"
Local mail delivery is slow, and causes sendmail to dial up the ISP. How do I stop the dial up for local mail?
I found that sendmail and wvdial.dod (SuSE 6.3) clash: to avoid dial up during SMTP restarts, wvdial.dod must be restarted first.
Technically 'sendmail' is not dialing up your ISP. It is attempting to access some site on the Internet (or on some non-local address/network) which is causing your system to call your ISP. That suggests that you have a copy if 'diald' (a dial-on-demand utility) installed, or that you've configured your 'pppd' with it's newer, built-in, dial-on-demand feature. Below I've included a link that should help with your immediate problem. However, I'm also going to explain a little bit about what is going on, based on clues in your question. I think it's more important that you understand the underlying principles then that you solve just this particular problem (since a bit of deeper understanding will help you find answers to many other questions).
/var/log/mail says:
``
gethostbyaddr(192.168.99.1) failed: 2 ''
This means that your copy of sendmail is trying to look for a host name based on its IP address. That is generally done by "reverse DNS" (DNS queries for PTR records through the in-addr.arpa domain). (Note: It's possible for that reverse lookup to be done through NIS or other protocols depending on your system libraries and the settings in /etc/nsswitch.conf (glibc a.k.a. GNU/Linux libc6) and/or /etc/hosts.conf (libc 5). The 192.168.*.* address here is one of those reserved for "private and disconnected" networks by RFC1918. That means that the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) will not issue any such IP address to any real site on the Internet. These are also known as "non-routable" addresses since there should never be any routes to them propagated across the Internet. Obviously the public DNS system should also NEVER contain references to these addresses (not in the A records nor in the reverse PTR records to match them). Sites using these RFC1918 addresses should be using them from behind firewalls (or on completely disconnected networks). Access to the Internet from hosts with these addresses (and the 10.0.0.0/8 and 172.16.0.0/12 ranges) should be done through application layer proxies or through "IP masquerading" (a particular form of Network Address Translation or NAT).
then it mails it localy.
I presume you mean that it "queues it locally." That is exactly what it should do.
/etc/hosts has:
``
127.0.0.1 localhost 127.0.0.2 machine.domain.com machine ''
You should probably just add lines to this file (your /etc/hosts) to match each of the RFC1918 addresses that you are using on your LAN. This and having the "files" entry in your /etc/nsswitch.conf like so: `` # /etc/nsswitch.conf hosts: files dns networks: files '' Should allow the gethostbyaddr() function to return reasonable results for local copies of sendmail. You'll also have to configure you copy of sendmail to relay its mail to some host that does have a DRIP (direct routable IP, or "real" address) or to queue the mail (which it seems to already be doing) until you dial-up to your ISP. There are some directions for doing this in the Linux Administrator's FAQ from the linux-admin mailing list. Here's a link to that FAQ: Linux Administrators FAQ List http://www.kalug.lug.net/linux-admin-FAQ/Linux-Admin-FAQ.html ... and here's the link that you want: 4.2 How do I set up sendmail for off-line use? http://www.kalug.lug.net/linux-admin-FAQ/Linux-Admin-FAQ-4.html#ss4.2 Hope that helps. These instructions will should help you configure your system for queuing all mail. One thing they don't say here is how to process the queues (to actually attempt delivery of your outbound mail). Assuming that you are using the Linux PPP daemon (pppd) you would add the following command to your /etc/ppp/ip-up script: `` /usr/lib/sendmail -q '' ... You should also define a "smart host" which would be some system, on the Internet (perhaps your ISP's mail host) which is reliable, "always connected" and which will relay your mail for you. That should allow your MTA (mail transport agent --- sendmail) to reliably pass all of your outgoing mail of to another system when you first connect. Otherwise it might be that you system will try to connect directly to each of your correspondents --- and that any of them which are unreachable at the time that you connect will cause some items of outgoing mail to be deferred (left in your queue). It's much wiser to pass you mail off to a system which is "always" connected when you come online so that it can handle the deferments and retries for you. It would also be possible for you to create a more elaborate ip-up script which would fire off a process that would loop around peforming 'sendmail -q' commands, perhaps sleeping for a bit, etc. Then you could have a corresponding command in your ip-down script that would kill your other script as you were disconnecting from the 'net. Those might be appropriate for a laptop, without dial-on-demand. It would also be possible for you to create a 'cron' job (a regularly scheduled event) which would attempt to process your MAIL QUEUE AT SOME CONVENIENt time. For example you might schedule it go off at 3am every morning. You might even configure it to check for any queued mail and only try to bring up your link IF you have anything in the queue. There is a 'mailqueue' command that might help with that. Note that this is only a few suggestions on how to handle mail for systems with intermittent Internet connections. There are many ways of doing this and there are a number of packages other then 'sendmail' that you can try. 'sendmail' is the most widely used MTA on the Internet. It is also the most complex and difficult to learn. One of the ongoing and raging debates among professional system administrators attempts to answer the question: "which MTA is best?" (to which I generally append the phrase "... for which purposes and situations?" --- just to really muddy the waters). I suppose I will now be inundated with messages from qmail, exim, and postfix advocates. So I'll just include URLs to them here: Sendmail (principally by Eric Allman): http://www.sendmail.org Qmail (by D.J. Bernstein): http://www.qmail.org Postfix (by Wietse Venema): http://www.postfix.org Exim (by a cast of thousands at the University of Cambridge): http://www.exim.org I'm sure I'll still get flamed for missing someone's favorite and for not revealing that this is more secure than that and this that one is the fastest MTA on the Internet, and this the other one violates RFC such-and-such, etc. {Sigh!}
/etc/resolv.conf has:
``
search localhost nameserver 207.217.126.81 ''
I presume that this is your ISP's nameserver. This tells me that you are probably an Earthlink subscriber (since I issue the command: `` dig -x 207.217.126.81 '' (Domain information groper) which does a reverse (-x) lookup on this IP address (in much the same way as your copy of 'sendmail' was attempting to do a reverse lookup on your own IP address). [Note: I've copied this message to the Linux Gazette "Answer Guy" editors. I've have been occasionally doing this for about three years (since I became the "Answer Guy" and approximately as long as the L.U.S.T. list has existed. However, I'm also trying to let people know about this, since I've been pretty laissez faire and cavalier about that in the past. The email addresses and most other personal information about my correspondents is never revealed in my column. If you object to my publication of this --- please let me know. If you mail "answerguy@ssc.com" it is presumed that you are consenting to publication. So far I've never received any complaint about this --- and I've answered over a 1000 questions on that forum and bazillions more over the years. Perhaps a couple dozen were culled from responses to the L.U.S.T. list] -- Jim Dennis, The Linux Gazette "Answer Guy" Linux Gazette is Published under the GPL http://www.linuxgazette.com answerguy@ssc.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send instant messages & get email alerts with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com/ -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/