[Sheflug] Saint Stephen (was fetchmail)

[Harvey Kelly <nospam [at] kelly.uklinux.net>]

Dearest Stephen (& Jose & Paul & all you other lovely people),

I'd like to get down on my knees and thank Stephen for solving this.  I
changed Earth to mail.uklinux.net and everything is hunk-dory.  I guess
that's why he's got a job in Japan being cool, and we all sit around
wanting he's babies.  Or perhaps not.  But you know what I mean.  Don't
you?

First time I ran fetchmail -v -k -a, it went beautifully and then returned
me to the prompt informing me that there was mail in 
/var/spool/mail/harvey waiting for me, aah....

That's E. and Fetchmail you've sorted out for me, is there no end to your
talents? 

Thanks again.

Harvey

On Thu, 22 Jun 2000, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> >>>>> "Harvey" == Harvey Kelly <harvey [at] kelly.uklinux.net> writes:
> 
>     Harvey> On Tue, 20 Jun 2000, José Luis Gómez Dans wrote:
>  
>     >> Fetchmail is not to blame, it's more a sendmail problem. It's
> 
> I don't see what sendmail has to do with it.
> 
>     >> (ii) your dns name resolution is knackered so it can't resolve
> 
> This is the problem.
> 
> (1) Can you successfully run "host <somewhere.net>" on the addresses
>     that fetchmail says don't resolve?  (Or use dig or nslookup,
>     whatever your DNS tool of choice is.)
> 
> (2) Are you running a local nameserver?  If not, who is providing name
>     service for domain "Earth"?  If so, is it really necessary?  Do
>     you know who your SOA is, etc?
> 
>     Harvey> Then a very strange thing happened... I opened up
> 
> It's not "strange", please to call it "user-friendly."  Otherwise
> you'd have to do it by hand or write your own script to do it.
> 
>     Harvey> /etc/rc.config, then went back to /etc/resolv.conf to make
>     Harvey> sure that I was looking at the right thing.
>     Harvey> /etc/resolv.conf now read...
> 
>     Harvey> search Earth
>     Harvey> nameserver 212.1.128.156
>     Harvey> nameserver 212.1.128.157
> 
> This looks bogus in the extreme.
> 
> I gather these are your ISPs nameservers?  Has your ISP taken
> responsibility for the .Earth domain?  If not, there is no way that
> anything named ".Earth" will be recognized by the DNS; only things
> explicitly listed in /etc/hosts with the fully-qualified domain name
> (FQDN) can be found, since the nameservers your host is using know
> nothing about ".Earth".
> 
>     Harvey> ... with no mention of anything else - least of all
>     Harvey> /etc/rc.config.
> 
> Didn't I tell you it was "user-friendly"?  :-(
> 
>     Harvey> I changed the first line to search Lucille.Earth
> 
> This means that no abbreviated domain can resolve, since you don't
> have any hosts named Something.Lucille.Earth according to the story so
> far.  Please RTFM ("man resolv.conf") and see if anything there seems
> to ring a bell.
> 
>     Harvey> In /etc/rc.config I filled the Nameserver="212.1.128.156
>     Harvey> 212.1.128.156" and Searchlist="Lucille.Earth" in, and the
>     Harvey> same message comes up when I run fetchmail, I've also
>     Harvey> tried different combinations of
>     Harvey> Lucille/Earth/Lucille.Earth in both resolv.conf and
>     Harvey> rc.config, and I've put nameserver ********* in
>     Harvey> resolv.conf as well.  No joy, the above message is what
>     Harvey> I'm getting everytime.  Does this shed any light?
> 
> The searchlist is irrelevant, except for (a) abbreviated domains
> properly registered with the DNS under one of the domains listed in
> searchlist, and (b) certain obscure DNS hacks targeted at intercepting
> traffic from your machine.  The searchlist is exactly analogous to the
> PATH variable, except that the separator is "." not "/", and the
> candidates in PATH are prepended to the target to make a fully
> qualified name for resolution, while the candidates in the resolver's
> searchlist are appended to the target to create a candidate FQDN.
> 
> Since the names in mail messages are FQDNs, the resolver should first
> try them without using the search path at all.  For some reason you
> are not getting any name service at all.  Can you browse the web?  Can
> you use the DNS tools like "host"?  What happens if you say "host
> domain.net" where domain.net is one of the names the fetchmail
> couldn't resolve?
> 
> Are you sure there are actually nameservers running at those IP
> addresses?
> 
> 
> -- 
> University of Tsukuba                Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
> Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences       Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091
> _________________  _________________  _________________  _________________
> What are those straight lines for?  "XEmacs rules."
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