Re: Sendmail Problem

[Nicholas Fitzgerald]

Well, I think we've gotten to the root of the problem here. I went and looked and sure enough, there was no MX record for the icesource.com domain. I must have completely spaced out on that when I set up the records on the new server. Needless to say, that fixed it. Also, the primary.icesource.com name server is defunct and has been replaced by the ns1.axelis.com name server. That icesource.com was pointing at the old server is also probably a big part of the problem. Thanks for all the help, I guess I need to be a bit more attentive when rebuilding/reconfiguring my DNS records after a change.  

Nick

Cowles, Steve wrote:

-----Original Message-----
From: Nicholas Fitzgerald
Sent: Saturday, February 22, 2003 2:33 AM
Subject: Re: Sendmail Problem


Well, that's the rub. IceSource.com is a web domain hosted
on this very server. The mail server, mail.icesource.com,
is on another box entirely. Nowhere am I telling sendmail to
go to icesource.com, in fact, it's the domain sending the
email to sendmail. I think this points me in the right
direction. If I create a DNS entry pointing at this server,
and direct sendmail to it, then I should be ok.  I think!

Nick
    

First, start by fixing your DNS server. It's totally hosed for
icesource.com.

$ whois icesource.com
[whois.crsnic.net]
....

   Domain servers in listed order:
 
   NS1.AXELIS.COM               xx.xx.123.173
   NS2.AXELIS.COM               xx.xx.123.174

$ dig +short @ns1.axelis.com icesource.com ns
primary.icesource.com.

$ dig +short @ns2.axelis.com icesource.com ns                
dig: Couldn't find server 'ns2.axelis.com': Name or service not known

Note that ns2.axelis.com did not respond. Plus, only one name server is
listed (primary.icesource.com). Since name servers are queried in a
round-robin order; some queries to your domain are going to fail. This
really needs to be fixed.

$ dig +short @ns1.axelis.com icesource.com mx
$ dig +short @ns1.axelis.com icesource.com a 
xx.xx.123.173
$ dig +short @ns1.axelis.com mail.icesource.com a            
xx.xx.123.172

As Anthony Greene correctly pointed out in his reply to your post - your
domain name icesource.com does not have MX records (note the plural) defined
for mail delivery. FWIW: MTA's (like sendmail) will first try to deliver to
the defined MX records, then to the A (address) record. Which looks like
what's happening in your case.

Fix your name server! Then try configuring your mail server.

Steve Cowles