tao.thought.org is back.....

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2006-10-18 17:14, Gary Kline <kline at tao.thought.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 19, 2006 at 12:57:08AM +0300, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
> > On 2006-10-18 14:12, Gary Kline <kline at tao.thought.org> wrote:
> > > 
> > > This is only for sendmail *wizards* out there.  It took me two
> > > hours of messing round with the /etc/mail/* files on ns1|sage
> > > before I just gave up.  After I rebooted both servers to get mail 
> > > to default to tao.  
> > > 
> 
> 	[[ ... ]]
> 
> > > My one question is given that mail defaults to my
> > > ns1.thought.org, HOW can I get it to go to (say) zen.thought.org,
> > > or to tao.thought.org?  or to ethos.thought.org?   OR what 
> > > re-initialization do I  have to do?  other than a shutdown -r
> > > now??
> > > 
> > > I thought I had this down cold, but nope.....
> > > 
> > > gary
> > > 
> > > PS:  Mail from my magnesium.net account mailed explicitedly to
> > >      kline at sage.thought.org, kline at ethos.thought.org,
> > >      kline at zen.thought.org, or kline at tao.thought.org---in other
> > >      words,  using the FQDN-- gets to which ever server.  But how
> > >      do I make "kline at thought.org" reach a specific server??
> > > 
> > > PS:  Apologizes if this seems like an obscure question; it IS....
> > 
> > By setting the "MX" records for `thought.org' up so that the one with
> > the lowest value of them all points to that specific server.
> > 
> > This should be configured in the name-server which hosts the DNS zone
> > for `thought.org'.
> 
> This would work [or ought to!]; right now, all my mail echange
> entries are equi-valued at 50.  But this seems like a back door
> way of dealing with sendmail.  I'm the first to admit that it's a
> less tha optimal suite, obscure beyond words, (etc).  But I'd
> like to understand how to resolve this problem with senmail....

Sendmail (or any other MTA, for that matter) should really *trust* the
DNS admin to properly configure MX records.

There's nothing wrong with relying on MX records which, for example,
point to:

    thought.org.	IN	MX	10	mx1.thought.org.
    thought.org.	IN	MX	20	mx2.thought.org.

If I understood what you are trying to do, then a nice set of MX
priorities *does* what you want.  Why would you want to mess with
mailertables? :)