Sendmail and MX records.

[Peter Jeffe 512.823.4091]

In article <1990Oct03.131111.23523 at turnkey.tcc.com> jackv at turnkey.TCC.COM (Jack F. Vogel) writes:
>In article <14315 at hydra.gatech.EDU> scott at prism.gatech.EDU (Scott Holt) writes:
>>
>>Does anyone know of a way to make Sendmail under AIX 3.1 understand
>>nameserver MX records? [...]
>
>Although the 3.1 sendmail is not a pure 5.61 port, it definitely does have
>the getmxrr code in it. As Robert Fries noted in another posting, it even
>has code for using other type records, although without server support this
>isn't particularly useful at the moment.

Well, BSD's BIND, which is the named shipped with AIX, has supported
the MB, MG, and MR records since at least version 4.3.  And I can't
imagine any other self-respecting nameserver not supporting these
records, since they have been defined all along in the RFCs (albeit
as "experimental", but that's no concern of the server).

All that's missing is for the nameserver admin to define the proper
records, and for the rest of the world to catch up :-).

>I would be fairly confident that there's a problem in your sendmail.cf. Before
>the routine getmxrr is called the options to the resolver to append the default
>domainname and to do a domain search are turned off, so you must be sure that
>this routine is passed a fully qualified name, otherwise the lookup will
>fail.

That's correct, and all you should have to do is specify the ANY value for
the K option (as well as the MX value).  Sendmail should then expand the
non-FQDN into the canonical form via an A or MX record that matches the
hostname.  So if you don't want the MB, MG, or MR records enabled, your OK
line should look like:

OK MX ANY

and this should get you flying.

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Peter Jeffe   ...uunet!cs.utexas.edu!ibmchs!auschs!sandino.austin.ibm.com!jeffe