Setting hostname - fake and real

[Luke Kearney]

On Wed, 9 Mar 2005 08:09:19 +0000
Ben Paley <ben at spooty.net> spake thus:

> Hello,
> 
> Is there an easy way to set a fake hostname in rc.conf which will let sendmail 
> send mail to external domains?
> 
> For ages I've had the line in rc.conf
> 
> hostname="potato.fake_domain.net"
> 
> (not exactly, but you see what I mean...) and I've had no problems with it at 
> all. Recently I've tried to set up sendmail, only so I can test php or perl 
> scripts that send emails!
> 
> Sending to localhost works fine, but mail to an external address is returned 
> by the remote domain because it couldn't verify my domain. Very sensible, I 
> could be a spammer. So I edited rc.conf to say
> 
> hostname="potato.real_domain.net"
> 
> that is, I used the name of a real domain which is registered to me. The 
> domain is hosted on the net, but AFAIK they don't have a machine called 
> "potato". Now apache won't start and I get weird errors in other things, like 
> shutting down X even!
> 
> Can anyone help?
> 
> Thanks very much,
> Ben


Hello Ben
Sounds like you might need some DNS magic here. I am not entirely sure I
understand why you would want to use fake dns names. It won't really
work properly and if testing scripts that send mail is the goal then a
FQDN is probably a good idea. Do you control the DNS for your 'real'
domain? If so add your host potato and if possible get a reverse DNS
entry to match.

For apache and X edit /etc/hosts and put the real information there and
your problems should go away.

HTH

LukeK
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