Error message found in /var/adm/syslog/mail.log

[Jessica Chou]

Got an error message like this,
"Sep 21 20:07:25 sendmail[1405]: gethostbyaddr(172.16.1.1) failed: 1",
among other reboot sendmail messages.

I dont know why it would try to send messages to 172.16.1.1. It's not our IP.
And I cannot think of any files would have
contained info about it.

File syslog.log's message "Sep 22 08:05:11 named[511]: dqflush: interface [172.16.1.1] skipped" was the only place I could find that reference to this IP.

Thanks for your help.

Jessica
PS: by the way, can "grep" recursively search
a string into all files and dirs under a dir?

[CHRIS_ANORUO]

Check in /etc/mail/sendmail.cf for any inclusion of the ip address.
To search a string you can use this command: cat /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log|grep Phy
This will give you the Physical memory of your system

[Stefan Farrelly · Accepted solution]

From those messages it looks like you used to have 172.16.1.1 assigned to one of the lan cards (interfaces) on your server. You can check now thats no the case with;
netstat -in
Either way, sendmail tried a hostname lookup on it and failed. Perhaps its no longer using that IP. Either someone tried to send an email out to/via this interface. Check this ip is still not configured in sendmail - check /etc/mail/sendmail.cf, if so you can remove it and restart sendmail.

Yes, you can use grep to search down a tree, eg. grep */* or grep */*/* I dont think it has the normal recursive option to go down an entire tree, -R, try it. Grep will have problems with binaries or binary files so it may go crazy if you do this, use the strings command instead.

[Danny Engelbarts]

Jessica,

I think Stefan is right on the IP-problem, i would do the grep as follows;

find -type f | xargs grep

Greetz Danny.

[Jessica Chou]

Thank you very much.
Exactly! The problem was caused by lan card configuation. There are two cards on our system and one of them is not being used and with the wrong IP.
So I comment out all related variables for this lancard in the file /etc/rc.config.d/netconf

Also,
find ./* -type f|xargs grep
works as what i need. thanks.

Jessica