Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!ai-lab!zurich.ai.mit.edu!cph From: cph@zurich.ai.mit.edu (Chris Hanson) Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp Subject: Sendmail problem in HP-UX 7.0 Message-ID: Date: 18 Oct 90 13:52:40 GMT Sender: news@ai.mit.edu Organization: M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Lab. Lines: 23 We've been experiencing a problem with sendmail in HP-UX 7.0, on both series 300 and 800 machines. Our hosts handle a large amount of mail traffic, and at least 10 times a day we get errors like the following: 421 ksuvax1.cis.ksu.edu (tcp)... Deferred: Address family not supported by protocol family 550 danvy@ksuvax1.cis.ksu.edu... Host unknown: Address family not supported by protocol family This error message is not only uninformative, but misleading. In fact, the problem seems to be that sendmail asked the nameserver for the address of this host, and it timed out before the nameserver responded. Sendmail reacted to this by returning the mail to the sender with an error message. It seems to me that when sendmail times out waiting on the nameserver, it should behave just as if the nameserver were not running. In this case, since the I option flag is set in the configuration file, sendmail should defer the message. This would solve the problem, since usually these mail messages succeed if they are retransmitted. In any case, this problem is causing many headaches for all of our users. If anyone has a solution, I'd appreciate it -- my only other alternative is to find another mailer and use that instead, but I don't want to be in the position of maintaining another mailer.