Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!maverick.ksu.ksu.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!mp.cs.niu.edu!rickert
From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Re: Local Configuration Error
Message-ID: <1990Sep25.134012.20789@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Date: 25 Sep 90 13:40:12 GMT
References: <2223@charon.cwi.nl> <1990Sep24.212433.774@mp.cs.niu.edu> <2229@charon.cwi.nl>
Organization: Northern Illinois University
Lines: 34

In article <2229@charon.cwi.nl> piet@cwi.nl (Piet Beertema) writes:

>The predefined meaning of $w is the "hostname of this site".

 Right.  But MX versions of sendmail go to great care to ensure this
means the fully qualified hostname.  The hostname is looked up in the
nameserver (with gethostbyname()) before assigning to $w.

>Redefining $w to be precisely the same but only with another

 Redefining is OK provided this gives the fully qualified host name.  It
might be necessary if hostname is something funny which does not lead to
the correct fully qualified value.

>representation can be useful (if only to make $=w in the sample
>config files work) and doesn't "violate" anything. I therefore

  There is a basic misunderstanding here.  Redefining $w (with a Dw line)
has absolutely no effect of $=w, which must be handled with a Cw (or Fw) line.

>maintain that $w should *always* be made fully qualified before
>comparing it to the contents of MX records.
>
  My personal preference, is to do the MX comparison with $j instead
of $w.  This is a trivial patch in deliver.c and is already in the IDA
versions of sendmail-5.64+IDA available at uxc.cso.uiuc.edu.  Since $j is
not normally used in the rewrite rules, there is no excuse for not getting
it right.

-- 
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  Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science               <rickert@cs.niu.edu>
  Northern Illinois Univ.
  DeKalb, IL 60115.                                  +1-815-753-6940