Lo, on Monday, November 12, Cheryl Homiak did write: > Ok, fitst I checked and made sure I do have a dynamic isp. I do. > Secondly, I now have got it to recognize my fqdn as > maranatha.chartermi.net and my dnsdomainname as chartermi.net.
> However, if I put localhost in between the "127.0.0.1 and the > "maranatha.chartermi.net" I will start getting "localhost" as the fqdn. Right. As I explain in my description of how the whole FQDN thing works (being sent in a separate message), your FQDN needs to be the first hostname on the line, immediately after the IP address. Putting it on the 127.0.0.1 address should be fine; this is what I do at work where I have a DHCP address. (This is actually documented in the /etc/hosts manpage, kind of. You have to combine that manpage with about three others to really understand what's going on.) > Also, as soon as I put localhost anywhere in the/etc/hosts, fetchmail > hangs right after looking at the first message; no delivery and no > explanation even on verbose. That's surprising: I've got localhost in my /etc/hosts, and fetchmail does just fine. See below for one possibility. > I also tried putting my internet address in the /etc/hosts file; though > it's dynamic it has remained constant. When I did this and ran fetchmail, > I got something about "neighbor table overflow". I'm not entirely sure I know what that's about. > When I type "ifconfig" my loopback interface doesn't show; if I type > "ifconfig lo" it shows but not as running. Only if I mannually bring it up > does it appear to be up. Ok. This may have something to do with why fetchmail is having issues. Check your networking configuration; your loopback interface should be up all the time. Make sure that /etc/network/interfaces contains the line iface lo inet loopback in addition to whatever you've got for your ethernet interfaces. > I also did notice when using pump "maybe dhcpcd would tell me this with > the proper options; I don't know) that my isp's hostname is showing up as > mad.chartermi.net (I assume mad for Madison) but I wasn't told to use the > "mad" anywhere. That's probably not that important. > While I do of course have an email address with my isp, they apparently > don't use a hostname to identify me, so I don't have a hostname per se > with them. This is normal. There most likely is a hostname associated with your IP; you can do an nslookup to find it out. However, if your ISP is like most others, the hostname is not going to just roll off your tongue; my *official* hostname (changed slightly to make it slightly harder for folks to break into my system) is d9c2358f.gw897.dsl.airmail.net---not terribly memorable. By the way, you don't actually have to use your ISP's domain name as your own. I used to do this, but I ran into problems when I tried to send mail to other addresses in the same domain: exim thought they should be delivered locally and complained because the usernames didn't exist. The easiest solution was just to give myself a unique hostname; now, all mail goes where it's supposed to.
