On Wed, Jan 09, 2002 at 09:07:16AM -0600, Robert P. Goldman wrote: > I have a small home network behind a firewall, so small that I haven't > thought it worth having a name server. My desktop machine runs sendmail (I > know, I should probably change to qmail or postfix, but that seems like a lot > of effort for low payoff on a single-user machine) and keeps putting into my > system logs a record that a gethostbyaddr call on its own (unroutable) > address has failed. Do you have your FQDN for your local host in /etc/hosts? If you do, you shouldn't have problems. Otherwise, consult the Sendmail manual and shut off DNS lookups. Look for a "Definition" string. With regards to a name server, if you have a small enough network, you really don't need one. "In the olden days" people distributed an /etc/hosts file to all the machines on the network. This doesn't scale too well, but it works great in small environments. As far as running this or that email server, it largely doesn't matter. You're behind a firewall. You should be able to use your ISP's SMTP server as a "SmartHost" and configure your local Sendmail as a "null client". As a null client, it'll defer DNS lookups to the upstream relay agent. Another term for a null client is a Mail Sending Agent (MSA). Mail Delivery Agent (MDA) applies to the local mailer, delivering email to local user accounts. The Mail Transport Agent (MTA) refers to an MSA+MDA. If all you need is a MSA, look into ssmtp[1]. It's a very small, simple MSA that has no local delivery capabilities and does not implement a local SMTP server. It doesn't open up a local port 25 to accept connections at all. It simply acts as a replacement for the basic sendmail commands to send email. It may not be the most elegant solution, but it works well. > I'm assuming I don't need to worry about this. Is there any way to kill the > error message (or should I just let it happen and filter it out of my > log-watcher)? You could do that as well. REFERENCES 1. http://packages.debian.org/stable/mail/ssmtp.html -- Chad Walstrom <chewie at wookimus.net> | a.k.a. ^chewie http://www.wookimus.net/ | s.k.a. gunnarr Get my public key, ICQ#, etc. Send email w/the Subject: "get help"