Mail problem in AIX PS/2 V1.2

[Jim Vlcek]

I've gotten a number of replies to my question about a sticky mail
problem with AIX PS/2 V1.2, in which all mail sent to the machine
bounces with the following retort:

From: MAILER-DAEMON at foobar.mit.edu (Mail Delivery Subsystem)
Subject: Returned mail: Service unavailable
   ----- Transcript of session follows -----
>>> HELO foobar.mit.edu
<<< 553 foobar.mit.edu Do not communicate with self
554 <root at FOOBAR.MIT.EDU>... Service unavailable: No such file or directory

People first suspected the name and domain macro and class definitions
in sendmail.cf, so here's what I've got there:

Dwfoobar
Cwfoobar
DDmit.edu
DEmit
DFedu
DG
DH
CE$E
CF$F
CG$G
CH$H
Dj$w$?D.$D$.

Does that wave any red flags?  Eliminating the null definitions of G
and H didn't help any.  Everything else looks exactly as it should.

Pete Resnick brought up four points:

1. Make sure your hostname is it /etc/hosts or on the nameserver.

It's listed in /etc/hosts alright, and is set up on the nameserver.  I
can do an nslookup on it from another host.  I'm not running named on
foobar, but instead have the following entries in resolv.conf:

domain  mit.edu
nameserver      18.71.0.151
nameserver      18.72.0.3
nameserver      18.70.0.160

2. Make sure that exact hostname is what is defined in sendmail.cf
   ... Maybe check the From field.

See above.  The From field seems to be just fine.

3. Make sure that /etc/master is using the same name as the hostname
   (i.e. the first name).

How do I accomplish this?  I edited /etc/master (had to chmod it
first, which was a bit ominous), and it seemed like the only thing
that would bear changing was the "name" parameter; I changed the
`default = "aixps"' line to `default = "foobar"'.  This had no effect.

4. If there are other host names that are available for this machine,
   make sure they are in sendmail.cf in the class names.

I've tried all of the following:

Cwfoobar
Cwfoobar foobar.mit.edu
Cwfoobar foobar.mit.edu local

"foobar" is the only host name the machine uses, anyway.  None of
these worked.

Any other ideas?!

PS - One strange thing is that, just before the prompt for login name
on the console, the system prints out "(noname)", as if the system
name is not defined.  Where does it get this name from?  Doing
"uname -n" or "chparm nodename" give the correct response ("foobar"),
but yet something doesn't seem to know the machine's name.

Jim Vlcek  (vlcek at caf.mit.edu  vlcek at athena.mit.edu)