[ale] dialup and sendmail

[Joe Bayes]

Joe Bayes typeth:

>Let me make sure I've got this straight...

Well, I've got it working now, but I still don't understand what I was
doing wrong, or what I did to fix it. I rebooted to a new kernel, then
discovered that I could send mail by telnetting to *my* machine's smtp
port (that didn't work before). I doubt the new kernel fixed anything,
but maybe the reboot did. 

I still can't send mail normally using vm, but I think if I RTFS I'll
get it to work. 

Many thanks for the suggestions. 

--joe


>I'm stuck behind a dial-up connection from cnmnetwork.com. I'm able to
>send mail locally on my machine, and I'm able to send mail to users at
>cnmnetwork.com. However, mail sent to anyone else on the 'net
>disappears and is never heard from again. No bounce or anything, it
>just doesn't arrive. 
>
>I took the stock sendmail.cf which comes with RH 5.2, and modified the
>entry: 
>
># "Smart" relay host (may be null)
>DSsmtp:smtp.cnmnetwork.com
>
>which, as I understand it, should deliver all non-local mail to
>smtp.cnmnetwork.com, which will then handle fowarding it on to
>wherever it's supposed to go. If I telnet smtp.cnmnetwork.com 25 and
>send my message from there, it arrives as it should.
>
>Before I changed the above entry in sendmail.cf, mail would accumulate
>in /var/spool/mqueue, presumably because my machine was trying to
>connect directly to the destination machine and the destination
>machine wasn't about to promiscuously exchange bits with some piddley
>dial-up machine. 
>
>What am I doing wrong?
>
>Another question: Why will random destinations exchange mail with
>smtp.cnmnetwork.com, but not my machine? Those destinations don't know
>who smtp.cnmnetwork.com is, any more than they know who I am, right?
>(Does this have something to do with MX records?)