Sendmail: Deferred: Name server: xxx.xxx.xxx: host name lookup failure

[Bill Vermillion]

At Mon, Jul 17, 2006 at 09:33 , our malformed and occasionally 
flatulent friend mike spewed forth this fount of brain juice:

> To add on...

> I was using sendmail/mimedefang/clamav on freebsd6.0 (w/ probably
> 8.13.4 before the patch) and got the same issue. It only seemed
> to have the problem w/ my local domain. I resolved it by running 
> bind on the local server w/ records for my local domain and having
> forwarders point to my normal internal nameservers (M$). Before
> switching my resolv.conf to point to localhost, it resolved all
> domains correctly (via dig), but I kept getting those same errors
> from sendmail. I think even putting it in /etc/hosts didn't work.

> Anyhow, the workaround came through and I haven't looked back, 
> but it sure would be nice to understand this one better. It seems
> googling brought up some stuff w/ sendmail not playing nice w/ M$
> nameservers (or switch these around if you prefer to lay
> appropriate blame) not working in certain instances but I forget 
> the details.

> This may or may not be related.

Speaking of 'not playing well with MS' I had a problem with that
eariler this year on a Linux machine I support that was updated.

I could send mail anywhere EXCEPT to machines running Miscrosoft 
exchange.

I kept getting a name not being able to resovle [or similar]
in the bounced mail from the MS machines.

I contacted the HW/SW provider who has a lot of clients on our mail
machines [not the problem machine] and asked him to check the logs
at their machine, which also bounced messages.

Of course as I've seen with many MS systems "We don't have logs -
they take up too much space" 

After checking and rechecing it turns out the machine name
got added with a trailing dot in the sendmail.cf when it was
set up with SuSE's interface.  

I just toss this out in case someone sees something similar -
coonections to all except MS machines working.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com