Problem with sendmail

[George Doller]

I am recieving the following when I try using sendmail to my pager: Deferred: Network is unreachable. I'm running 8.9.3 of sendmail on an 11.0 unix machine. when I run sendmail on my 10.20 machine with 8.8.6 of sendmail it works. I've checked everything I can think of and I'm looking for some insight.

[Helen French]

Hi,

Check this out:

http://us-support2.external.hp.com/cki/bin/doc.pl/sid=fc9e30091145bdb3fc/screen=ckiDisplayDocument?docId=200000056837561

HTH,
Shiju

[Uday_S_Ankolekar]

Hi,

did you check the DS flag in sendmail.cf file on the 11.00 box.

The DS entry should have a mail relay host name infront of it, If not add this entry and restart the sendmail by /sbin/init/sendmail stop ,/sbin/init.d/sendmail start. Sendmail file is in /etc/mail directory

Goodluck,

-USA..

[Craig Rants]

Let's check a few things (hostname represents the server name of the email address you are trying to send to):

nslookup hostname
this will try to resolve the server,if that works try
traceroute hostname
this will try to find a route to the server, if that works

Go to the homepage of your service provider and send yourself a page (most providers offer this ability), and see what address it give you, maybe it isn't what you were told.

GL,
C

[harry d brown jr]

george,

from both machines do a test to see if nslookup can resolve the domain names.

live free or die
harry

[Ron Kinner]

Can you ping the address for your pager? Can you traceroute to it? Does
nslookup pageraddress
return anything? Is it the correct address (compare with the working machine).

Does netstat -rn show the proper routes - especially the default?

Ron

[Steven Gillard_2]

Sounds like a routing issue. Does the system have a default route configured? Can you post 'netstat -rn' output?

Regards,
Steve

[Mark Greene_1]

run this:

mailq -v -d

and that will show you if sendmail has been configured with a different hostname or domain name than what is actually the case for your environment.

HTH
mark

[George Doller]

I've gone through some off the responses and the only one that was different from the server that works to the one that doesn't work was the route table. I made them look the same and now I received the following error. archwireless.net: Name server timeout. transient parse error. message queued for future delivery.
thanks for any input. will give points shortly.

[Mark Greene_1]

>I received the following error. archwireless.net: Name server timeout. transient parse error. message queued for future delivery.
<

Is your DNS internal or external to your DMZ, and does it forward to your ISP's DNS for look-ups external to your network? Can you resolve other external sites?

mark

[George Doller]

I'm not sure I can answer all the questions. From what I understand we have an internal wins server that has these servers addresses in it. We have a lightpath provider I believe is doing our DNS for us and I can resolve hp.com yahoo.com from both machines but I can't resolve archwireless.net from either machine.
Thanks

[Ron Kinner]

This seems to be more a problem with the archwireless.net server than with your system. When I try to do an nslookup on archwireless.net I get a "server failed" message. Ditto for arch.net. arch.com is working and it appears to be the correct company. Assuming no one else can get to them I think if I were you I would go to www.arch.com and click on the
Contact Us link at the bottom of the page and ask them what is wrong with their server.

Ron

[George Doller]

My 1 server can sendmail to archwireless.net and my other one can't so I know the address works. I just get errors as explained above.

[Ron Kinner]

OK. Perhaps out firewall is blocking it.

Try to get the ip address for the archwireless.net by doing

nslookup archwireless.net

on the one that works.

What does it say? Does it tell you where it found the IP address? Compare that to the same command on the one that doesn't work. Is it using a different DNS server perhaps?

Ron

[George Doller]

When I nslookup archwireless.net on the machine that works I get no address information. I guess I need to talk to the network guys to see if there is an entry in the firewall for the 1 system and not the other. thanks

[Craig Rants]

Try telneting to port 25 on the archwireless mail server.

telnet archwireless.net 25

and see if you get a response back.

if so type in these commands

helo "yourdomain.com"
mail from: "youremailaddress"
rcpt to: "yourpageraddress"
data
Test
.
quit

See if that goes. If it works, look at your resolv.conf and nsswitch.conf for errors or problems. If all else fails try putting archwireless.net in your /etc/hosts and seeing how that works.

GL,
C

[George Doller]

I cannot get to the archwireless.net site. it is a mobile pager system. My guess is that the firewall is preventing the sendmail to get out of the building on 1 system but letting the other system send mail.

[Craig Rants]

George,
Do you get an error message back from the telnet? Usually you will get a connection refused or connection closed by pier type error is a firewall blocks that specific connection. What about pings or traceroutes to that ip, you may be able to trace to a certain part of your network and see if there is a firewall or router not passing the traffic on. Network guys are usually more likely to listen to you if if you have evidence rather than telling them it is a networking problem, (and I should say SA's are the same way).

Look forward to more info,
C

[Ron Kinner]

It's possible that the firewall is the root of all your evil but the funny thing is that nslookup on the good pc does not return an ip address so how does the good system know where to go? I think you need to talk to your DNS guy and ask him what is going on.

Does
nbtstat -c
work on the good one? That's a windows command but if you have a WINS server then who knows maybe it will work.

Does

traceroute archwireless.net

go anywhere?

Ron

[George Doller]

these are hpux servers running 11.0 not PC's telnet and traceroute to archwireless.net returns unknown host on unix machine where sendmail works and the one that doesn't. Basically I don't know what else I can tell you. Systems look to be setup the same but 1 works 1 doesn't. I am going to talk to the firewall people.

[Ron Kinner]

I've been doing some research. The DNS keeps records for mail servers separate from its normal records. These records are of type mx.

Go to the good machine and type:

nslookup

it should return with the name of the server and a > prompt. Type:

set type=mx

this should just return another > prompt. Now type:

archwireless.net

now get out with:

exit



Write down what you get and then do the same on the bad one. Compare the two. Of particular interest is first, the name of the server and second, the ip address it gives you at the bottom. Do they match? My bet is that you have two different DNS servers but there could be something in the sendmail.cf or version of sendmail which keeps it from getting the mx record.

Ron

[George Doller]

I tried that, when I entered set type=mx I got a message invalid option. I tried set all and compared. info is the same. when I tried archwireless.net i got no address information is available.
Thanks for your time.

[George Doller]

Just an added note. All the sendmail queued messages eventually came to my archwireless.net pager. They took more than 12 hours each. Does this help anyone understand whats going on. Does anyone know where my problem may lie?