Re: donegal fell into hyperspace and can't get up

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

Jim, did you remember to BCC Dennis personally?  He's not in the
headers otherwise, and he's not listening to TLUG....

>>>>> "Jim" == Jim Tittsler <jwt@example.com> writes:

    Jim> In article <199609111232.VAA00222@example.com>, you
    Jim> (Dennis McMurchy) wrote:
    >> My host name (donegal) does not seem to exist!: Connection
    >> refused

    Jim> It sounds like it can't do a lookup and find the IP address
    Jim> of your machine.

Ie, it's not sendmail's problem, it's your TCP/IP-Inet configuration.
Can you do any Inet operations, like Mosaic, ping, host, traceroute?
Do you have all your old files from /etc/?

    Jim> Does /etc/host.conf say: order hosts,bind

    Jim> (This causes the local /etc/hosts file to be checked before
    Jim> looking for another name server.)

I think this is most likely; I don't think that you would have a
buggy sendmail that doesn't know how to use gethostbyname and bind.

Is this documented anywhere?  I know it's necessary from experience,
but I can't find it (of course my man page set is from Slackware's
"T.Rex" version, most of it refers to "Linux 0.99"!!)  Similarly, the
documentation for "hosts.equiv" etc is rather confusing.

    Jim> Does your /etc/hosts file include:
    Jim> 172.16.2.xxx donegal.your.domain
    Jim> ^^^^^^^^^^^^ (or whatever your IP address is)

If you add "localhost", on some systems it will use a Unix-domain
socket which is much faster and reduces network load (shared memory vs
IP loopback).  This may also make the IP address irrelevant.  I don't
know if this works on Linux.  (This is a last resort, so be careful;
for all I know, it could work in the opposite direction, turning all
Unix-domain sockets into TCP/IP sockets!)  If you have the
fully-qualified domain address, you might want to add just 'donegal'
as an alias; I don't know if it makes any difference.  My own system
has

127.0.0.1	localhost

in /etc/hosts along with all the other Inet hosts I need to know about
when Tsukuba-dai's name-servers go down (which is far more often than
my Linux system does :-( ) which might also be all you need (since
sendmail can use hostname to figure out that 'donegal' is 'localhost').

Do you have your old sendmail.cf?

Do you absolutely have to have sendmail, or would smail or qmail do?
(Yes, I know that you'd rather use what you've been using, but (a)
sendmail documentation sucks, (b) it's riddled with obscure code that
could be security holes, and (c) configuration is incredibly
complicated, all of which point to more problems down the road.  Not
that smail is that much better, but at least the config files look
intelligible.)

Good luck,
Steve

-- 
                           Stephen John Turnbull
University of Tsukuba                                        Yaseppochi-Gumi
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences  http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tennodai 1-1-1, Tsukuba, 305 JAPAN                 turnbull@example.com
-----------------------------------------------------------------
a word from the sponsor will appear below
-----------------------------------------------------------------
The TLUG mailing list is proudly sponsored by TWICS - Japan's First
Public-Access Internet System.  Now offering 20,000 yen/year flat
rate Internet access with no time charges.  Full line of corporate
Internet and intranet products are available.   info@example.com
Tel: 03-3351-5977   Fax: 03-3353-6096