[LUAU] Sendmail Strangeness

The Tuba God jhealy at wso.williams.edu
Tue Feb 23 11:46:06 PST 1999


I've got one for you...

We recently switched distros to Debian from Slackware (sorry Rob), and
we've been getting this weird thing with Sendmail.  Every couple of days,
sendmail will decide that it can't find any other host on the network, and
it does this for about half an hour.  It bounces any message going to a
remote host, claiming that "Name server: host.foo.any.: host not found" (a
full bounce is included at the bottom of this message)  It does this for
all hosts, regarless of where they are.

During this time, however, the web server is great, nslookup is fine, and I
can ping the bejezus out of the hosts sendmail "can't find", so it doesn't
seem to be a general networking problem.  The bounce below represents my
attempt to telnet striaght to port 25 and send a message to myself on
another host, so there's nothing between me and sendmail that could be
goofing off, as far as I know.  I find this all very odd.

Hupping sendmail does nothing -- we currently just ride it out and wait for
sendmail to right itself, which it does after about 30 minutes.  However,
all this mail goes undelivered in the meantime.

Any ideas?  We're running Sendmail 8.9.3/8.9.3/Debian/GNU (installed as a
package for Debian, so we didn't compile it ourselves)

Thanks,

Jason

----

Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 23:21:24 -0500
From: Mail Delivery Subsystem <MAILER-DAEMON at wso.williams.edu>
To: jhealy at wso.williams.edu
MIME-Version: 1.0
Subject: Returned mail: Host unknown (Name server: mail.williams.edu.: host
not found)
Auto-Submitted: auto-generated (failure)
Lines: 41
Status: RO

The original message was received at Mon, 22 Feb 1999 23:20:51 -0500
from localhost [127.0.0.1]

   ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
00jbh at williams.edu

   ----- Transcript of session follows -----
550 00jbh at williams.edu... Host unknown (Name server: mail.williams.edu.:
host not found)

Reporting-MTA: dns; wso.williams.edu
Received-From-MTA: DNS; localhost
Arrival-Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 23:20:51 -0500

Final-Recipient: RFC822; 00jbh at williams.edu
Action: failed
Status: 5.1.2
Remote-MTA: DNS; mail.williams.edu
Last-Attempt-Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 23:21:23 -0500

Return-Path: <jhealy at wso.williams.edu>
Received: from student-00jbh (localhost [127.0.0.1])
	by wso.williams.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3/Debian/GNU) with ESMTP id XAA11076
	for 00jbh at williams.edu; Mon, 22 Feb 1999 23:20:51 -0500
Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 23:20:51 -0500
From: Jason Healy <jhealy at wso.williams.edu>
Message-Id: <199902230420.XAA11076 at wso.williams.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0

foo!


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