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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!simtel!zombie.ncsc.mil!news.duke.edu!news.mathworks.com!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!soda.CSUA.Berkeley.EDU!forest From: forest@soda.CSUA.Berkeley.EDU (Forest Edward Wilkinson) Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Please Help: Name server timeouts from sendmail Date: 6 Oct 1995 00:54:36 GMT Organization: Computer Science Undergrad Assoc., Univ. of Calif. Berkeley Lines: 40 Message-ID: <451uoc$4o5@agate.berkeley.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: soda.csua.berkeley.edu Summary: senmail queues outgoing messages to remote hosts indefinitely Keywords: sendmail bind named dns freebsd firewall timeout queue smart host Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.mail.sendmail:20972 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:7167 Hi there. I'm trying to configure sendmail for use on a machine behind a firewall. I want it to deliver mail directly to machines it can find in DNS, and pass off everything else to the firewall machine. The problem is that when I try to send a message to a machine that's not visible in the internal DNS (any machine on the outside of the firewall), sendmail queues the message indefinitely, reporting a "Name server timeout". I'm running sendmail 8.6.11.1 on FreeBSD 2.0.5-950622-SNAP. The machine is called "neko". Here's what's in "neko.mc": include(`../m4/cf.m4') VERSIONID(`@(#)neko.mc $Revision: 1.16 $') OSTYPE(bsd4.4)dnl MASQUERADE_AS(teamx.riatax.com)dnl Cw teamx.riatax.com define(`SMART_HOST', smtp:riasmtp.riatax.com)dnl MAILER(local)dnl MAILER(smtp)dnl LOCAL_NET_CONFIG R$* < @ $* . > $* $#smtp $@ $2. $: $1 < @ $2. > $3 If I add "FEATURE(nodns)dnl", mail to external hosts gets passed off to the firewall correctly. However, I don't want to diable DNS lookups. Note that there is a name server running locally, but queries on unknown hosts take nearly 30 seconds to fail. This is probably because my root name server is on the other side of a slow WAN link. Can someone help? Thank you very much, Forest -- 森 forest@csua.berkeley.edu