Howdy all. I previously posted to the nmh-workers list that I couldn't
send mail with my installation of nmh 0.14 because I was getting the error
message "post: unexpected response; [BHST] no socket opened".
Well, it's been resolved, somewhat. The MH FAQ talks a bit about this
issue, saying that if post can't open a socket it's because your localhost
loopback stuff isn't set up correctly. I can't compare my AIX 4.1 results
directly to the Linux expected output, but it appears to be OK, I think:
powerpc02-dlh> ifconfig lo
0821-514 ifconfig: error querying kernel extension /usr/lib/drivers/if_lo:
The file access permissions do not allow the specified action.
powerpc02-dlh> ifconfig lo0
lo0: flags=808000b<UP,BROADCAST,LOOPBACK,MULTICAST>
inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000 broadcast 127.255.255.255
powerpc02-dlh> netstat -r
Routing tables
Destination Gateway Flags Refs Use Interface
Netmasks:
255
255.255.255
Route Tree for Protocol Family 2:
default firewall UG 13 297833 en0
loopback localhost U 3 39440 lo0
198.99.175 powerpc02 U 68 1455385 en0
I am of course behind a firewall, which no doubt complicates things. When
I was using the IBM-provided version of MH I was able to send mail with no
problem. Actually, there was a slight problem that wasn't on my side --
some mail servers would refuse to accept mail from me because they
couldn't do a reverse lookup on my hostname because my IP address would
appear to be that of the firewall.
Therefore I set up sendmail to use the firewall machine as an Internet
relay machine (DR). That way, if I send mail with no hostname it'll use
SMTP internal to the firewall and if I send to Internet addresses it'll
use the firewall's SMTP server as a proxy. It didn't quite work -- email
to machines inside the firewall (like "dlh(_at_)ibmserver") still went out to
the firewall, but at least unqualified names ("dlh") would be delivered
inside the firewall as expected.
Unfortunately nmh doesn't get as far as MH was able to and can't open a
socket, so as a solution I set the 'servers' variable in the mts.conf file
to 'firewall'. Now mail to the outside world works, but of course now I
can't send mail inside the firewall with nmh. This turns out to be OK as
nobody really uses their internal mail boxes anymore and I can always use
the built-in MH if necessary.
[BTW, the FAQ should be updated to reflect that nmh has renamed mtstailor
to mts.conf.]
Sorry for being so long-winded, but anyway, I got rid of my socket
problem, but now I'm having another problem -- mhl keeps getting signal
-1. When I read a MIME-encoded mail I get:
signal -1
at the end of each section, and when I 'repl' to a message, I get:
mhl: signal -1
Has anyone seen this behavior before? It seems not to actually cause a
problem, but it's definitely annoying.
--------------------------------------
| Dan Harkless | |
| dan_nmh(_at_)unitech(_dot_)com | MH FOREVER! |
| Unitech Research, Inc. | |
--------------------------------------