On Thu, 8 Jul 1999, Steve Revilak wrote:

> If you give a single machine name in this field (eg "oatmeal"), sendmail
> will complain.  Changing it to "oatmeal.my_house.net" will stop it.
> 
> Here's the part of the puzzle I'm not sure about....
> 
> This is something that's puzzled me -- what is the proper way to qualify
> a machines name if it's not a legitimate registered domain.

Good question! There's no convention that I know of. I think you just
have to make something up.
 
> If you're doing resolutions to some other nameserver (eg -- an ISPs) it
> doesn't seem like it would matter -- your "bogus" qualification
> shouldn't exist.
> 
> But, running a nameswerver locally (probably impractical on a dial up
> line, because when the connection was down named would still try to
> contact root servers for names not listed in it's cache) -- would the
> "bogus qualification" inhibit the lookup of a "real" domain that had the
> same name?

Yes it would. But what are the chances that there's a top level domain
somewhere named "localnet" or "at.home"? That's what I've been
doing--using a completely bogus top-level domain. Another idea I've
yet to try is to use the name associated with my single ip addr as the
domain name for the other two machines.

I did set up a nameserver for my ip-nat'ed dial-up connected machines
exactly for the purpose of limiting the spew that was bringing up the
demand dialing. I set it up to not advertise any authority to the
outside, and to not even accept queries except on the internal
network.