reversed behavior with nsswitch.conf

[Tim Dettloff]

On 17/02/06, Foo <foo @ virtual - voodoo . com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have run into this as well.  I am a student in a class that required
> us to set up sendmail in an environment where we don't have access to
> the local DNS, so all our resolution is done via /etc/hosts.  I had to
> be able to send email between our three *nix boxes, and it kept breaking
> on the DNS resolution. Initially, I used mailertable entries to
> circumvent the issue since every other strategy I found to turn off DNS
> resolution for sendmail didn't work.  However, upon reading this, I
> switched the order of the
> "hosts" settings in nsswitch.conf and got rid of the mailertable entries
> and it worked.  So yes, I have run into the issue as well.  I am using
> 6.0-RELEASE.
>
> Hope this helps.
> Joel
>

Hi,

One thing you have to remember about sendmail is that in most cases it
has to use dns, as mx records cannot be specified in /etc/hosts.

See "sendmail specifics" http://www.sendmail.org/email-explained.html.

 Tim