[colug-432] sendmail using wrong domain

[Scott Merrill]

On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 1:40 PM, Eric Floehr <eric at intellovations.com> wrote:
> I've not done sendmail configs recently, but it seems to me it will look up
> the ip addresses of each interface to determine the hostname to use in the
> from address.  Does host.dept show up first when you do an nslookup on any
> of the ips on that server?

Looking up host.osu.edu returns

Non-authoritative answer:
host.osu.edu  canonical name = host.dept.ohio-state.edu.
Name:   host.dept.ohio-state.edu

This Red Hat machine was built to replace an Ubuntu machine on our ESX
cluster (it was decided that manually building the VMWare tools for
Ubuntu was more trouble than switching to Red Hat and installing the
RPM). Luckily, we had a saved copy of the old Ubuntu VM in a
powered-off state.

Looking at the Ubuntu configuration, I see that the host was defined
as host.dept.ohio-state.edu. I reconfigured the Red Hat system to be
the same (host.dept.ohio-state.edu instead of host.osu.edu). I punted,
and rebooted, to make sure all the services started properly, and mail
is being delivered now.

Thanks, everyone, who lent a hand.

Cheers,
Scott

> On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 1:28 PM, Scott Merrill <skippy at skippy.net> wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 1:23 PM, Eric Floehr <eric at intellovations.com>
>> wrote:
>> > Can I assume that you've ruled out something in sendmail.cf (i.e. Dj
>> > directive)?  Are all the RHEL servers identically configured?  Do they
>> > all
>> > have similar host.osu.edu and host.dept.osu.edu domains?
>>
>> I have not modified sendmail.cf. I've never needed to in the past.
>>
>> Interestingly, this is the only server in our department that is
>> host.osu.edu and host.dept.ohio-state.edu. Although when I installed
>> it, I'm pretty sure I only used host.osu.edu when setting up the
>> network.
>>
>> > It seems to me the question is, why does sendmail think the host domain
>> > is
>> > host.dept.osu.edu rather than host.osu.edu.  Is that a fair statement?
>>
>> Yes, that is exactly correct.
>>
>> > If so, it seems sendmail.cf is one of the few places you haven't
>> > mentioned
>> > where it could be picking up that domain.
>>
>> Again, I haven't touched sendmail.cf. I've never had to do so in the past.
>>
>> I'm not sure where host.dept.ohio-state.edu is even entering the
>> equation here. It's certainly not defined anywhere on the server that
>> I can find.
>>
>> If necessary, I can have that entry removed from the DNS configuration
>> for our zone, too.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Scott
>>
>> > On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 1:16 PM, Scott Merrill <skippy at skippy.net>
>> > wrote:
>> >>
>> >> On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 12:57 PM, Rob Funk <rfunk at funknet.net> wrote:
>> >> > On Thursday 11 February 2010 12:49:58 pm Scott Merrill wrote:
>> >> >> I generally prefer Postfix, too; but this is not a mail server. It's
>> >> >> just a server that needs to send its cron output to someone (me), so
>> >> >> installing Postfix seems a bit overkill.
>> >> >
>> >> > On the contrary, *sendmail* is overkill for that. Postfix is great
>> >> > for
>> >> > both
>> >> > large and small jobs, but these days sendmail is really only good for
>> >> > large
>> >> > or complicated jobs.
>> >>
>> >> Let me restate my comment, then:
>> >>
>> >> installing Postfix just to solve this problem seems like more yak
>> >> shaving than I'm interested in right now.
>> >>
>> >> None of the other Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers in my environment
>> >> have exhibited this specific problem. I'm loathe to change the MTA on
>> >> this one server to deal with this problem. I'm not going to install
>> >> Postfix for all of our machines just because one system is behaving
>> >> oddly.
>> >>
>> >> If anyone has any advice or suggestions _other than_ "install postfix"
>> >> (or "install Exim" or "change your MTA") I would like to hear them.
>> >>
>> >> Thanks,
>> >> Scott
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>> >
>> >
>>
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