Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!uw-june!uw-entropy!bogachiel.ms.washington.edu!hubert
From: hubert@bogachiel.ms.washington.edu (Steve Hubert)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: sendmail_5.61 and resolver
Message-ID: <1201@uw-entropy.ms.washington.edu>
Date: 25 Jan 89 23:43:52 GMT
Sender: news@uw-entropy.ms.washington.edu
Reply-To: hubert@bogachiel.ms.washington.edu (Steve Hubert)
Organization: UW Math Sciences, Seattle
Lines: 33

Some time in between version 5.52 and 5.61 of sendmail there were two
new lines added to deliver.c that are causing me trouble, and I don't
understand why they are there.  If I comment them out it seems to work
correctly but I don't want to do that since I don't know why they
were added.  The two lines that have been added are the following two:

	_res.options &= ~(RES_DEFNAMES | RES_DNSRCH);		/* XXX */
	_res.options |= RES_DEFNAMES | RES_DNSRCH;	/* XXX */

The problem that these lines are causing me is this.  There is a call
to getmxrr() in between the line that explicitly turns off RES_DEFNAMES
(use default domain name) and RES_DNSRCH.  When I get to this getmxrr()
call I don't always have a fully qualified name.  I might have a
hostname with no domain extension at all.  This ought to be fine since
the host is in the same domain as the default domain.  When I comment
out the turning off of this resolver option it seems to work fine.
By the way, I am using Bind 4.8 for name service and resolver code.

Here is a specific example.  Mailing from host hilbert.ms.washington.edu
to user@bogachiel (which is also in the domain ms.washington.edu).  The
default domain on hilbert is ms.washington.edu.  This results in a call
to getmxrr() with an argument of bogachiel, not bogachiel.ms.washington.edu.
If the DEFNAMES option is left turned on it works fine but with it commented
out it fails with stat=Host unknown.

So the question is, what are those two lines there for?  And what does
the comment /* XXX */ mean?  That looks ominous, sort of like a skull
and cross bones or something.  Can you think of anything bad that might
happen if I comment those lines out?

Steve Hubert
hubert@bogachiel.ms.washington.edu
University of Washington