Robert Elz wrote:
> Sendmail will actually be connecting to "localhost" which has no dots,
> and hence the resolver presumes initially is intended to have the
> local domain (or whatever is set as  the search list) appended - only
> when that fails will it fall back to just trying the name alone.
> 
That seems broken!  After all, can we depend on clueful DNS 
administrators having the localhost.domain setup?  I think not!


> You can also tell that from the messages in the qf file you posted
> earlier - sendmail notes the first host name it tried that failed,
> not later ones that just happened to also get tried (which makes
> sense, the one it tries first is the one it is really attempting
> to contact).
> 
Ah!

The incredibly short (default install) resolv.conf merely says:
;
; BIND data file
; Created by NetBSD sysinst on Fri May 30 21:34:04 2003
;
nameserver 141.211.133.111
search citi.umich.edu

===

I'm not as familiar with the relatively new nsswitch.conf as I ought to 
be, but thought the (default install) 

#       $NetBSD: nsswitch.conf,v 1.5 1999/10/24 12:36:52 lukem Exp $
#...
hosts:          files dns

should search the hosts file first?

===

#       $NetBSD: hosts,v 1.6 2000/08/15 09:33:05 itojun Exp $
#...
::1                     localhost
127.0.0.1               localhost
#...
#
# Added by NetBSD sysinst
#
127.0.0.1       localhost
141.211.133.36  dreamer.citi.umich.edu dreamer

Should that obviously unneccessary duplicate line be 
"localhost.citi.umich.edu"?

-- 
William Allen Simpson
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