UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

After further review it appears that the direction I was given from our support staff was wrong.

What is happening is that the mail is being routed to our DNS and resolved through it to reach or nt server (hence the slowdown). The way the mail should work is that since the nt server is on the network and it's IP is in the hosts file I would think the mail program should just access the nt server and deliver the mail.

I may revert back to the sendmail.cf file before the changes from that ta document and try to getting it working from there.

What do you thinK?

Thanks

Sendmail is going to use DNS. I don't think you can or should get around this. If you set the sendmail.cf file to dump all email to the NT server, then it should not be going through the DNS servers (it will go there for the resolution of the A record and PTR but it will not actually send the email there).

To speed up the DNS lookups, start up a cache-only DNS server on your Sendmail server and put it's own IP at the top of the /etc/resolv.conf. This way everything stays local for DNS (after it gets the records it needs from the primary or secondary).

Using a caching only server should not be a problem with security, but you and your associates need to work that out.