Re: smail Hostnames
On Sat, Apr 18, 1998 at 09:26:32PM -0500, Art Lemasters wrote:
> > Depends on your network topology, of course. However, I guess that your
> > DNS mail exchange records for your own machine will look like:
> >
> > IN MX 1 yourownhost.com (this makes it its own default)
> > IN MX 10 relayhost.com (the alternate relay host)
> Thanks, Marco. Do you mean by writing a .forward file to
> the account on relayhost.com, for example? Would it still hold
> the account's mail until downloads are requested (by fetchmail,
> for example), or would it attempt to forward mail immediately
> to yourownhost.com and give an error?
Um, not exactly. This is a level below doing a .forward. With a .forward,
mail from accounts on relayhost gets passed to yourhost. By specifying
relay machines for mail transfer, the mail actually gets passed to
yourhost as mail destined to accounts on yourhost. The use of MX records,
as I specified above, is a routing thing.
I'll try to diagram it like so:
using forward -
joe@devnull sends mail to mpa@relayhost, which is then sent to mpa@squawk
using some forwarding mechanism (a .forward, procmail, forward on a vm/cms
machine ...)
using MX records -
joe@devnull sends mail directly to mpa@squawk, which will pass through one
or another machine and end up in mpa@squawk's mailbox.
In my personal case, every bit of mail that goes to my own box from
outside Queen's University goes via the machine extmail.queensu.ca - but
you don't know that, and you don't have to know that. There are two other
workarounds established for times when extmail is down, but you don't have
to know that either.
> I know these questions in regards to dynamic IP accounts are
> a bother to some of you, but the answers could certainly propogate
> the use of Debian LINUX if well-documented.
Hmm ... didn't know you had a dynamic IP. In order to use a mail relay for
a dynamically addressed machine, you have to have to be well acquainted
with the admin of your mail relay (or go whole hog and just get a UUCP
account somewhere - less hassle, certainly) because in order to be a good
net citizen, you'll have the mail relay take your mail, spool it, then
pass it on when you happen to be online.
I thought that, since you were going to get your own domain name, that you
had a mechanism for mail to get to it (and having a 24/7 net connection
allows you to receive mail by tcp/ip). Now that you have a dynamic
address, and a dynamically allocated hostname, there should be another way
for mail to get to you (otherwise mail to you is going to end up bouncing
quite frequently).
However, to return to the original question, how to receive mail at a
single host, but with the mail sent to more than one hostname, add new
hostnames to /etc/smail/config's hostname line and break them with colons,
like so:
hostname=yourhostname.com:yourhost1.com:yourhost2.com:otherhost.com
That should answer your original question.
marco
You can't fight in here, Marco Anglesio, mpa@squawk.klue.on.ca
This is the War Room! http://squawk.klue.on.ca/
President Merkin Muffley
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