My original post on Wed, 17 Sep 1997 was:
> Recently I configured my Sparc 20 Solaris 2.5.1 system to respond to
> an extra IP address to server another web site by:
>
> ifconfig le0:1 206.198.221.101 up
>
> and setting up our DNS server to associate www.dave.com to
> 206.198.221.101. Unfortunately, we could not setup
> reverse resolution tables so that you can get www.dave.com when
> asking 'what system is 206.198.221.101 ?'. This is all fine, and
> we set this up intentionally, but I am having a problem with
> sendmail.
>
> I now get the following message about every 10 minutes from sendmail:
>
> Sep 17 08:46:52 athena.syrres.com sendmail[10366]:
> gethostbyaddr() failed for 206.198.221.101
>
> and you can force this message more frequently by issuing the command:
>
> /usr/lib/sendmail -q
>
> I have checked in the /var/spool/mqueue directory and there is no queued
> mail. The only way to fix this is by putting the following entry in
> my /etc/hosts file:
>
> 206.198.221.101 www.dave.com
>
> This makes sense since we don't have reverse resolution for www.dave.com.
> I can live with this for a while, but I am curious why sendmail even
> cares what 206.198.221.101 maps to.
>
> Any ideas?
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
>
> Dave
>
The short answer is: that's just the way it is!
as Nickolai Zeldovich wrote:
>sendmail tries to find and bind to all interfaces on a given machine.
and David Wolfskill wrote:
>It's part of the code that does canonicalization of hostnames; there may
>be other uses, as well.
>
>The direct references are in conf.c & daemon.c.
***************************************************************
* David Cain Phone: (315) 452-8341 *
* Syracuse Research Corp. Fax: (315) 452-8310 *
* 6225 Running Ridge Road mailto:cain@syrres.com *
* North Syracuse, NY 13212 http://athena.syrres.com/~cain *
***************************************************************
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:12:03 CDT