On Fri, Aug 31, 2001 at 09:14:59PM -0400, Steve Linberg wrote:
> Kind people,
>
> I'm having a problem that has been reported on this list in the past:
> qmail having difficulty delivering to msn.com addresses, returning with
> the "CNAME lookup failed temporarily" problem. The strange thing is that
> this just started happening about a week ago, and my server has been
> running for about a year with none of these kinds of problems until
> recently. I suppose it's possible that no mail to an msn.com address had
> gone through until recently, but I don't have an easy way to verify that.
>
> At this point, the messages are really starting to pile up in the logs.
>
> ===================================================================
> Aug 31 20:51:44 shagrat qmail: 999305504.557112 delivery
> 59171: deferral: CNAME_lookup_failed_temporarily._(#4.4.3)/
> ===================================================================
>
> The FAQ refers to the "aliased hostnames" issue, which I don't think is
> the problem with msn.com.
>
> Section E.2 of "Life with Qmail" ("Why can't I send mail to a large site
> with lots of MX's?") suggests that the server might be returning too large
> a response, and refers to the patch to allow bigger DNS packets. I'm just
> about positive I used this patch; the suggested test (sending a message to
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] and seeing if it clears the outbound queue)
> works successfully.
Hm, that does suggest that you have the patch. But you should be sure,
so check it.
> I'm running BIND 8.2.3 on a RH 6.2 server, with qmail 1.03 (built from
> source last October). It appears to be working fine in all other
> respects. I'm not a DNS expert and I'm a little hesitant to rebuild qmail
> unless it's absolutely necessary.
Testing on a BIND 8.2.4 cache, it indeed returns a 931 byte response
for MX msn.com. dnscache is much more sane and only returns 373 bytes,
containing just the MX records.
Instead of rebuilding qmail, you may want to consider using dnscache
instead of BIND.
> Chuck Foster reported this exact problem in 1997
> (<http://lists.omnipotent.net/qmail/199711/msg00342.html>), and his fix
> was a gnarly patch, but since that was almost four years ago I'm
> hoping/assuming that that patch made it into the qmail source.
His fix is similar to the bigdns patch. Also, patches rarely make it
into the qmail source.
> If anybody has any advice or suggestions, I'd welcome them anxiously.
dnscache and/or the bigdns patch. Let us know :)
Greetz, Peter
--
Monopoly http://www.dataloss.nl/monopoly.html
