On Tue 15 Nov 2016 at 08:00:31 -0500, Greg Wooledge wrote: > On Mon, Nov 14, 2016 at 04:29:35PM -0600, David Wright wrote: > > As your own hostname -f produces not dots, what approach do you > > use to shut exim up, or do you just ignore (or suppress) the message? > > I have (control over) a bunch of computers, and they're not all configured > the same. The machine I believe you refer to is this one: > > wooledg@wooledg:~$ hostname > wooledg > wooledg@wooledg:~$ hostname -f > wooledg > > This is a dual-boot Windows/Debian workstation on my desk at work. > > Here's the /etc/hosts: > > wooledg@wooledg:~$ cat /etc/hosts > 127.0.0.1 localhost > 127.0.1.1 wooledg
Exim wants to see a fqdn in the 127.0.1.1 line, written as specified in hosts(5): IP_address canonical_hostname [aliases...] The canonical_hostname is used for the HELO/EHLO. With most large ISPs it is not taken much notice of but there are servers which (rightly or wrongly) would do a reverse lookup on wooledg and, getting a negative response, reject the mail. Basically, you will get away with the line you have when you use an understanding smarthost. I think Postfix could behave in the same way. > # The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts > ::1 localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback > ff02::1 ip6-allnodes > ff02::2 ip6-allrouters > > The hostname is defined in DNS (originally I just let it have a dynamic > IP address and dealt with that, but later I arranged for it to have > a non-changing IP address, for reasons beyond the scope of this email; > but in all cases, DNS always had a working "A" record). > > It looks like this one is running exim: > > wooledg@wooledg:~$ ps -ef | grep exim > Debian-+ 949 1 0 Nov14 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/exim4 -bd -q30m > wooledg 10865 2007 0 07:53 pts/4 00:00:00 grep exim > > I never saw any errors like the one you showed, perhaps because exim > used my default search domain (from /etc/resolv.conf) and found a sane > DNS configuration, or perhaps because this machine is in a very simple > "send to smarthost only" mode. I don't really know exim very well. With 'dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config' the message "Starting MTA:hostname --fqdn did not return a fully qualified name, dc_minimaldns will not work. Please fix your /etc/hosts setup." should appear if "yes" is chosen for the option. 'hostname -f' is useful for checking there is a sane hosts configuration for exim to use. -- Brian.
