[CS-FSLUG] Sending E-mail's via Network

[Frank Bax]

At 01:50 PM 7/27/04, David M. wrote:

>On Tuesday 27 July 2004 01:12 pm, David M. wrote:
> > On Tuesday 27 July 2004 12:12 pm, Josiah Ritchie wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2004-07-27 at 11:47, David M. wrote:
> > > > On Tuesday 27 July 2004 11:41 am, Josiah Ritchie wrote:
> > > > > Hm... there are a lot of ways. How do you want it to work. First,
> > > > > does buddy have an SMTP server on it? If you don't know, you could
> > > > > portscan with nmap and see if it pops up or just telnet to the smtp
> > > > > port on buddy.
> > > >
> > > > Yeah I have an SMTP server on it. This is what I use for sending my
> > > > regular mail such as this one.
> > >
> > > Do you have 2 NICs and only have SMTP on the outside one? Does the SMTP
> > > server know where buddy is? Have you tried localhost instead of buddy?
> > > I'm basically just trying to follow the path all the way through and
> > > figure out where the connection drops off. If you can confirm it into
> > > the SMTP server, you then have to confirm it out. If not, it's lost in
> > > there somewhere and it's time to figure out where the log is for it.
> >
> > I only have 1 nic. I did figure out one thing I was doing wrong, I was
> > using this e-mail address to send the mail to my local network which is
> > located somewhere else and not on my network and it was trying to send the
> > mail through that server that resides in florida.
> >
> > So I created a new identity for sending mail on the network here locally so
> > the mail will not try to go thru the server in florida and should go
> > straight to my mailbox here on this computer.
> >
> > Also when I try to retreive mail, I noticed an error: "Transmission failed:
> > Could not lock /var/spool/mail/dmcglone"
> >
> > Whats that mean?
>
>Ok now I figured out that I have to send mail to dmcglone at localhost for it to
>work correctly, and I cannot send mail to dmclgone at buddy. Why is this so? can
>I change it so it will send mail to dmcglone at buddy instead of
>dmcglone at localhost?
>
>Here's an example header of what worked:
>
>hello from dmcglone's local account
>
>From:
>"David M." <dmcglone at buddy.Buddy>
>
>
>To:
>dmcglone at localhost.Buddy
>
>
>Date:
>Today 01:24:26 pm
>
>I see that it's from dmcglone at buddy.buddy, but sending mail to
>dmcglone at buddy.buddy produces nothing but lost mail somewhere.
>--
>David M.


I'm certainly no expert in this area, but I think you are getting 
buddy.buddy and localhost.buddy because the system needs to resolve partial 
host names (without a period) into a fully qualify hostname (with at least 
one period).  I think it uses /etc/resolv.conf to do this - my guess is you 
have a line 'search buddy' in there which adds '.buddy' to the end of the 
'buddy' hostname that contained no periods.  Somedays I like to make 
statements like this simply to see if anyone tells me I don't know what I'm 
talking about.