Subject: 'Unknown host' on AIX system

From: [email-masked] (Tony Dyson)
Date: 22 Nov 1994 00:25:16 GMT

This _must_ have a simple answer.

I can send a mail message from our central VAX to an address at,
say, aol.com or tolkin.enet.dec.com or something and it goes through
no problems. If I try to send the same message from pine on my own
workstation (AIX 3.2.5) it doesn't go anywhere and bounces back with
an 'unknown host' error. Not knowing very much about mail, I don't
even know where the problem lies. Can I reconfigure pine so that this
doesn't happen, or do I need to go further down the layers?

Hoping somebody can help me out!

	Tony

--
================================================================

  Mr. Anthony J. Dyson		[email-masked]
  Dept. of Physics		phone: +49 21 5425
  University of Newcastle	fax:   +49 21 6907
  Callaghan, Australia, 2308

================================================================

---

From: @kant.Physik.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Klaus Wacker)
Date: 22 Nov 1994 08:50:11 GMT

> doesn't happen, or do I need to go further down the layers?

My guess is that its not a pine problem, but a sendmail configuration
problem on your RS6000. Check the file /etc/sendmail.cf. If you find a
line which starts with OK, then my guess is wrong. But if you find no
such line, or one that is commented out (starts with #OK), then either
add a line

OK MX

or

OK ALL

I never understood the difference between the two, I use OK ALL and it
works. I also never understood why its not configured this way by
default. 

You have to do `refresh -s sendmail' afterwards. You need root
privileges to do all this.

--
 
|  / |              | | |        |            [email-masked]
| /  |  _       __  | | |  _   _ |     _   _  Klaus Wacker, Exp.Physik V
|/\  |  _\ | | (_   | | |  _\ /  |_)  /_) |   Uni Dortmund
|  \_|_(_|_|_|___)  |_|_|_(_|_\__| \_/\___|   D-44221 Dortmund 
                                              +49 (231) 755 3587

---

From: [email-masked] (Trey Harris)
Date: 24 Nov 1994 16:20:13 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
Klaus Wacker <[email-masked]> wrote:
>[Regarding OK MX and OK ALL for sending mail to AOL]
>

On our AIX machine (14,000 users, many of whom are sending to AOL) we
use OK MX, which also works fine.  But we had to discover the hard way
after thousands of users got "aol.com: host unknown" messages.

-- 
Trey Harris                              http://sunsite.unc.edu/harris
--Stranger in a Strange Thread!

---

From: [email-masked] (Klaus Wacker)
Date: 24 Nov 1994 20:02:25 GMT

> after thousands of users got "aol.com: host unknown" messages.

To avoid misunderstandings: the OK MX or OK ALL isn't just for AOL.
You need it for any site which has some kind of central mail server
configured. My email address is an example.

--