[Pkg-exim4-users] two elementary questions

[Marc Haber]

Hi,

On Mon, May 16, 2005 at 12:09:51AM -0700, David Liontooth wrote:
> Marc Haber wrote:
> >>>On Sun, May 15, 2005 at 08:15:04PM -0700, David Liontooth wrote:
> >>>      
> >>>
> >>>>When I try to mail to a local user, I get "R=dnslookup T=remote_smtp
> >>>>defer (111)"
> >>>>        
> >>>>
> >>>So the system doesn't consider that mail local and tries to send to
> >>>the smarthost.
> >>>      
> >>>
> In brief, if I chose 'satelite', to get exim4 to consider any mail local
> I need to manually add in this kind of thing:
> 
> dc_other_hostnames='chianti.cogweb.net'

Yes, as mentioned in the update-exim4.conf man page.

> Is that correct? So that means it's a local address?

Yes.

> That's really not self-explanatory.

Yes, but unfortunately hard to change without breaking updates. We'll
reconsider this post-sarge.

> I added this,
> borrowing from exim3 a more explicitly named variable:
> 
> dc_local_domains='localhost:chianti'

It is a bad idea to borrow anything from exim 3. Exim 4 is a
completely new package, and so it's not a miracle that
dc_local_domains is completely ignored by update-exim4.conf.

> That seems to work, but I haven't tested if this line is what makes
> the difference. Which one do I really need?

The one that is documented.

> The fact that there's no universal default configuration is
> a given; it's still useful to suggest a commonly valid default.

Right, but there is no commonly valid default for e-mail. If we
suggest a default, mail will be lost or invisibly queued in some
setups, which is a bad thing. We have been through this.

> >"This name will also be used by other programs; it should be the
> >single, full domain name (FQDN) from which mail will appear to
> >originate." "chianti" is not a fully qualified domain name. This is
> >one of the first changes that will be done to the Debconf templates
> >once the strings have been unfrozen after sarge's release.
> >  
> >
> If I use the FQDN, will exim4 still understand this is to
> be treated as the local machine?

The Mail Name and the list of Local Domains are two entirely different
things. The Mail name is used to qualify the _sender_ of _outgoing_
mail, while the list of Local Domains determines what to do with
_incoming_ mail. The one exception being the hub_user router, which is
only used in satellite configurations which have no notion of "local
mail".

> >>I suspect
> >>my problem was that I kept chosing 'satellite' at the start --
> >>    
> >>
> >No, satellite is fine.
> >
> Interesting -- but only after manually adding local machines,
> right?

I was wrong here, sorry, it's too early in the day. "satellite" does
translate to "mail sent by smarthost; no local mail", which _really_
means "no local mail". What you need is the "smarthost" setup,
translating to "mail sent by smarthost; received via SMTP or fetchmail".

> >Mail is - unfortunately - a little more complex than your average core
> >package, and the debconf templates have been frozen for too long time.
> >  
> >
> I see -- so this is pain inflicted by a delayed sarge?

This is pain inflicted by the base freeze happening way too early -
and <rant> we locally froze our string templates way before the base freeze
was officially started to be nice to our translators.

What we have here is a classic case of having misleading documentation
in some-40ish-languages instead of having correct documentation at
least in the default language.</rant>

Greetings
Marc, not being a friend of translated system messages at all

-- 
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