Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!convex!killer!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!cornell!parmelee
From: parmelee@wayback.cs.cornell.edu (Larry Parmelee)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Re: Overlaying smail and mx-sendmail?
Message-ID: <21448@cornell.UUCP>
Date: 30 Sep 88 19:08:55 GMT
References: <8602@shamash.UUCP> <99@cwjcc.CWRU.Edu>
Sender: nobody@cornell.UUCP
Reply-To: parmelee@wayback.cs.cornell.edu (Larry Parmelee)
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept, Ithaca NY
Lines: 20

Chet, In article <99@cwjcc.CWRU.Edu> you write:
> 2.  In ruleset 0 of your sendmail.cf, add a rule like this that asks the
>     resolver if a host is in the name server:
> 
> 	R$+<@$+>$*		$:$1<@[$ $2. $]>$3
> 
>     This tells sendmail to canonicalize the host name it's currently focusing
>     on, with a dot appended. If the host is found, the host name is rewritten
>     and will lose the dot at the end.

You need to be careful about the above method.  In the 4.8 version
of BIND (sendmail 5.59), a trailing dot is taken to indicate a
rooted name.  For example, if I lookup "devvax.tn" here, it
changes into "devvax.tn.cornell.edu", but if I lookup "devvax.tn.",
it fails, because the trailing dot tells the resolver routines that
the name is to be looked up as if "tn" existed at the same level as
"edu", "com", or "gov".

-Larry Parmelee
parmelee@cs.cornell.edu