>First of all, thanks very much!  Between you and Jim Miller, I got the
>encouragement and guidance I needed.  The proof's in the pudding: see my from
>address?  

much better.  :)

>Second, you had me ROFL for 10 minutes, positively giddy.  I knew anyone
>*could* poke into my DNS with nslookup, but that's the first time anyone *did*. 
>It just felt very funny to have my homely set of names echoed back to me. 
>Very thorough.  Thanks for that advice, too.  

not a problem.

>Third, it looked to me like some of the messages I got from you were sent to
>jklowden@lowden.schemamania.org.  I'm very confused about that.  I do use a
>bimap command in ipnat for lowden, but I'm still surprised mail got through
>because the external address isn't exposed in the DNS.  Care to comment?  

i replied to the message you sent without tweaking the "to:" address
before i sent it.  as such, i sent one message to that address, but
since i can't actually connect to that machine from here (you're using
rfc1918 addresses), i rewrote the envelope recipient address in the qf
file and told sendmail to rerun that queue file.

>What I did between 7 and 9 tonight:  
>
>I wound up following the directions in the readme (big surprise), adding your
>contents to a copy of usr/share/sendmail/cf/netbsd-proto-IPv4only.mc.  
>
>I m4'd it, trying (with doubts) to hup sendmail.  She stopped.  OK, so sendmail
>is not bind.  

yeah...errors.

>Then she wouldn't restart, complaining:
>
>/etc/mail/sendmail.cf: line 84: fileclass: 
>	cannot open '/etc/mail/local-host-names': 
>		No such file or directory
>
>So I did what anyone might try:
>
>	echo lowden >/etc/mail/local-host-names
>	
>which was all I had to do before sendmail -bd.  

the generic domain that i told you to use has, among other things,

	FEATURE(`use_cw_file')dnl

which makes the cf file contain the line

	Fw/etc/mail/local-host-names

which is not "optional".  i think for your purposes, you might wanna
put all your fully qualified domain names in there if this machine
will be your ultimate mail receiving box.  that way it won't try to
forward it elsewhere and will drop it in the loval mailbox(es).

>  == second topic: DNS ==
>  
>> it might also help to have mx records for lowden, children, sandbox,
>> and home that all point to home.
>> 
>> also...add a second ns record that points to ns1.speakeasy.net so that
>> you get the redundancy you're supposed to get.
>
>The latter point is clear, but I don't know what you mean by "mx records for
>lowden, ... that all point to home".  I re-read the mail chapter in "DNS and
>BIND", which goes to great lengths to explain backup mail hosts, but I didn't
>notice anything about MX records that "point to" anything.  What am I missing
>here?  

all the hosts in your dns zone that have a records have no mx records.
this means that sendmail (and probably all other mtas) will try to
deliver directly to the address.

if you give all the hosts (that have actual addresses, not cnames) mx
records that point to the one host that *is* reachable, the problem
you had with lowden would be much alleviated.  mail bound for anyone
at lowden.schemamania.org would then be delivered to home (for
possible further delivery).

>Once again, thanks.  It was amusing and interesting.  I learned something.  
>I'm very glad I asked for help instead of punting and switching to another MTA. 

any time.  :)

-- 
|-----< "CODE WARRIOR" >-----|
codewarrior@daemon.org             * "ah!  i see you have the internet
twofsonet@graffiti.com (Andrew Brown)                that goes *ping*!"
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