On Sun, 2007-11-11 at 14:28 +0000, Chris G wrote: > What I *don't* quite understand is why sendmail thinks this is > isbd.net and why I couldn't tell it what the system should really be > called. Everything else (apache, ssh, etc.) thinks it's called > home.isbd.net. Have you set those other services up explicitly, or are they all presuming something? I recall that some services will check the current hostname, do a reverse IP look up on that name, then do a forward name look up on that IP, and go with the last result. e.g. If your hosts file had: 192.168.1.1 computer.example.com computer in it, and the computer hostname was set at "computer" (the hostname is NOT "set" by the hosts file, that's done elsewhere), a service would check the the IP for computer, get told 192.168.1.1, then it'd check what hostname is associated with that IP, and go with the answer (which will be the first name after the IP), and decide that it is computer.example.com. The same sort of thing applies for DNS, rather than the hosts file (the first answer is it). Things get can messy when something/somebody puts their hostname into the local loopback line (the 127.0.0.1 one). Mail server address working out can be a little surprising if you have proper DNS records. You may well have the computer set to be home.example.com, but if the MX record for the example.com domain is set to example.com, that's the mail server address. -- (This computer runs FC7, my others run FC4, FC5 & FC6, in case that's important to the thread.) Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
