Bug#607542: exim4: errors expanding MAIN_RELAY_NETS, ETC_MAILNAME etc

[Arnout Engelen]

Package: exim4
Version: 4.69-9+lenny1
Severity: important

Lurking in #exim, it appears the recent security update in stable is causing
problems related to expanding macros/variables like MAIN_RELAY_NETS and
ETC_MAILNAME in the configuration.

Symptoms include not being able to send mail at all, errors such as:

2010-12-18 17:07:48 1PTzK0-0001uY-PW <= arnouten at ETC_MAILNAME U=arnouten P=local S=1953 id=20101218160748.GS25767 at bzzt.net
2010-12-18 17:07:48 1PTzK0-0001uY-PW ** pkg-multimedia-maintainers at lists.alioth.debian.org: Unrouteable address
2010-12-18 17:07:48 1PTzK0-0001ua-Ts Error while reading message with no usable sender address (R=1PTzK0-0001uY-PW): at least one malformed recipient address: arnouten at ETC_MAILNAME - malformed address: _MAILNAME may not follow arnouten at ETC
2010-12-18 17:07:48 1PTzK0-0001uY-PW Process failed (1) when writing error message to arnouten at ETC_MAILNAME (frozen)

And in another instance:

2010-12-19 10:30:06 no IP address found for host MAIN_RELAY_NETS (during SMTP connection from localhost (li37-79.members.linode.com) [127.0.0.1])

Unfortunately I've somehow fixed the problem in my instance without properly understanding what's going on, but I figured it might be good to collect information in a bugreport anyhow.

For the ETC_MAILNAME problem i believe the workaround was to manually replace ETC_MAILNAME with the contents of /etc/mailname in the configfile used by exim - but that's obviously a workaround...

-- Package-specific info:
Exim version 4.69 #1 built 10-Dec-2010 14:00:42
Copyright (c) University of Cambridge 2006
Berkeley DB: Berkeley DB 4.6.21: (September 27, 2007)
Support for: crypteq iconv() IPv6 PAM Perl Expand_dlfunc GnuTLS move_frozen_messages Content_Scanning Old_Demime
Lookups: lsearch wildlsearch nwildlsearch iplsearch cdb dbm dbmnz dnsdb dsearch ldap ldapdn ldapm mysql nis nis0 passwd pgsql sqlite
Authenticators: cram_md5 cyrus_sasl dovecot plaintext spa
Routers: accept dnslookup ipliteral iplookup manualroute queryprogram redirect
Transports: appendfile/maildir/mailstore/mbx autoreply lmtp pipe smtp
Fixed never_users: 0
Size of off_t: 8
Configuration file is /var/lib/exim4/config.autogenerated
# /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf
#
# Edit this file and /etc/mailname by hand and execute update-exim4.conf
# yourself or use 'dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config'
#
# Please note that this is _not_ a dpkg-conffile and that automatic changes
# to this file might happen. The code handling this will honor your local
# changes, so this is usually fine, but will break local schemes that mess
# around with multiple versions of the file.
#
# update-exim4.conf uses this file to determine variable values to generate
# exim configuration macros for the configuration file.
#
# Most settings found in here do have corresponding questions in the
# Debconf configuration, but not all of them.
#
# This is a Debian specific file

dc_eximconfig_configtype='smarthost'
dc_other_hostnames='mintzer.bzzt.net;bzzt.net;thunk.nl;engelen.eu;setzer'
dc_local_interfaces='94.229.57.123;127.0.0.1'
dc_readhost=''
dc_relay_domains=''
dc_minimaldns='false'
dc_relay_nets=''
dc_smarthost='213.197.30.111'
CFILEMODE='644'
dc_use_split_config='true'
dc_hide_mailname='false'
dc_mailname_in_oh='true'
dc_localdelivery='maildir_home'
mailname:bzzt.net

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 5.0.7
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.25-2-686-bigmem (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages exim4 depends on:
ii  debconf [debconf-2.0]      1.5.24        Debian configuration management sy
ii  exim4-base                 4.69-9+lenny1 support files for all Exim MTA (v4
ii  exim4-daemon-heavy         4.69-9+lenny1 Exim MTA (v4) daemon with extended

exim4 recommends no packages.

exim4 suggests no packages.

-- debconf information:
  exim4/drec: