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gormenghast

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sendmail

Hi

Have an error appearing from sendmail....

<hostname> sendmail[25156]: unable to qualify my own domain name (<hostname>) -- using short name


This does not seem to cause any problems and is happening on a new Enterprise 250 running Solaris 2.6. Have recently installed two E250s but this is only happening on one of them.

Any help?
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tfewster
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edit /etc/mail/sendmail.cf to fix your domain name on the machine giving you errors; I presume the other system is its domain info from the first?
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chris_calabrese

This error is caused by the system not being able to figure out what DNS domain it is in, usually caused by DNS not being setup properly.

I'm guessing that one of the machines is either not in the DNS maps or that one machine has a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) alias listed in /etc/hosts and the other doesn't.

The machine needs to be setup so that one of the following is true:
  "nslookup `uname -n`" returns a valid FQDN.
  Similar mappings are made in NIS.
  Simmilar mappings are made in /etc/hosts
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ASKER

Hi

chris.....
"nslookup `uname -n`" on both machines returns the same.....
*** Can't find server name for address 127.0.0.1: Unspecified error
*** Default servers are not available

Couldn't spot any differences in /etc/hosts on each machine.


tfewster....
/etc/mail/sendmail.cf is identical on both machines (checked using diff)
This warning messages come with new version of sendmail.
To avoid this messages you must edit your /etc/hosts and add alias for your hostname.domainname.
you have no setup DNS, if this is what you want (sendmail without DNS), try:

FEATURE(nodns)
You say there are no differences in the /etc/hosts, but that doesn't mean that they are correct.  Do they each contain their own machine's FQDN, or is it that they both contain only the FQDN of the machine that works (since you say they are the same they must both contain it if one does)?

Meanwhile, you should also try ahoffman's FEATURE(nodns) suggestion.  I think Sendmail still needs to kow the FQDN even if it thinks there's no DNS, but I'm not a Sendmail expert, so perhaps this will work.
I am not using dns.
ahoffmann.......should "FEATURE(nodns)" be added to sendmail.cf?

I have two unix servers and one unix workstation on the same network, which know about each other through /etc/hosts and are trusted via hosts.equiv and .rhosts. mail will sometimes have to be delivered from one unix box to another.
I can achieve this by setting one box up as a mailhost by replacing sendmail.cf with main.cf and adding mailhost to the entry in /etc/hosts. The entry for my official hostname in sendmail.cf is then Dj$w.$m. Whether this is the correct way to acheive this I am not sure but it seems to work, although I still get the unqualified domain name error messages.

Contrary to the information originally posted the errors do occur on both machines.

Any further help would be appreciated
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tfewster
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gormenghast, you're using Sun's original, and proprietary, sendmail, right?
Then keep in mind that this is very special about handling mails when configured with main.cf or sendmail-subsidary.cf (for example: it mysteriously knows a "mailhub").
Sorry can't help with Sun's sendmail, 'cause I always replace it by http://www.sendmail.org 8.9.x .
As long as you use Sun's sendmail, comments based on HP-UX, or whatever, may not be very usefull, sorry.
Thanks to all for the help
Unfortunately I have to choose only one comment to award points.

tfewster gave the comment which helped me the most although I acknowledge chris and kawins original suggestions were on the right track.

I did not set the domain name using `domainname` but just added an alias in /etc/hosts to a domainname (which is not actually used).
All works fine now on both servers.

Thanks again to all involved.
In that case I believe I answered the question 100% correctly back in my original post when I said...

The machine needs to be setup so that one of the following is true:
                  "nslookup `uname -n`" returns a valid FQDN.
                  Similar mappings are made in NIS.
                  Simmilar mappings are made in /etc/hosts