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From: casey@admin.cognet.ucla.edu (Casey Leedom)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail,comp.dcom.lans
Subject: Re: sendmail, the resolver and /etc/hosts
Keywords: host aliases, cononical names
Message-ID: <16169@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>
Date: 24 Sep 88 01:11:27 GMT
References: <713@ncar.ucar.edu> <1469@valhalla.ee.rochester.edu> <5589@killer.DALLAS.TX.US> <69882@sun.uucp>
Sender: news@CS.UCLA.EDU
Reply-To: casey@cs.ucla.edu.UUCP (Casey Leedom)
Organization: UCLA
Lines: 44

In article <69882@sun.uucp> nowicki%rose@Sun.COM (Bill Nowicki) writes:
> >About half the time when we try such a mail address, we get back an error
> >from the other machine's sendmail saying "I refuse to talk to myself" and
> >the user's mail drops on the floor one more time!  
> 
> I fixed this in SunOS sendmail by just adding all the IP addresses to the
> "w" class.  You might have to shuffle around some of the lines in your
> sendmail.cf to make this work, but it has the advantage that a single
> sendmail.cf runs on all your machines; no need to hard wire in the
> addresses.  Note the IDA enhancement that allows multi-token class
> matches needs to also be incorporated for this to work.

  A much better way of doing this is to properly canonicalize names in
your sendmail.cf using $[...$].  $[foo$] will return/substitute the
canonical name of "foo", even if foo is an IP address.  No wonder you
never ran into the $[...$] bug in your sendmail Bill ... :-)

Casey

P.S.
  I also toss my vote in on the side of *NOT* munging the name server to
grung through /etc/hosts if it fails to get a response for a given name
query.  So far all the proponents have managed to say is:  ``Oh, oh, oh -
it's just too much work to find all those names we've added to our local
hosts table over the years and add them to a special name server file.''

  If you're so bloody well hooked on all those localisms, fine.  But
don't insist on inflicting your bad management and laziness on everyone
else.  You couldn't keep track of all the local additions you made to
your hosts table, not us.  The name server has a perfectly adequate
method of dealing with the problem that you've come to us with as has
been pointed out several times now.  The change that you're asking for is
both pointless and detrimental to the conversion to the domain name
system.

  If you have to, grab the latest NIC hosts table, process and sort it,
sort yours, and then do a comm(1) to extract your localisms and then put
them into a special name server file so your users are happy.

P.P.S.
  The previous P.S. had nothing to do with Bill's note.  I'm sure I would
never see him arguing for such additions to the name server.  He knows
better.  (Very definitely a sharp cookie that one is.)  Bill just got
stuck with the Subject line that that discussion has been running under.