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Re: Procmail development (Was: is this procmail rant justified?)

2002-02-07 10:27:22
At 19:14 2002-02-07 +0900, Nelson Henry Eric wrote:

My point is that there are ALWAYS transient DNS or network problems, at
least from about January 4, 2002.

Talk to your network people and ask "what changed?" Perhaps the host was moved, S/W upgraded, or the DNS altered (if you can trust the SOA serial number, which in this case is forunatley a dated format, then the most recent change was in late October 2001 - perhaps you had insane TTLs before, and they've been made reasonable, which then causes the underlying network connectivity problems to cause resolution troubles because the host isn't cached forever).

The procmail list will accept mail from 
user(_at_)nara(_dot_)kindai(_dot_)ac(_dot_)jp, but not
user(_at_)irm(_dot_)nara(_dot_)kindai(_dot_)ac(_dot_)jp(_dot_)  Those machines 
are on the same physical lan,
on the same ethernet (163.51.110.0/24) and under the authority of the same
DNS.

... but they're not SERVICED by the same DNS servers:

$ host -t NS irm.nara.kindai.ac.jp
irm.nara.kindai.ac.jp. name server ns.nara.kindai.ac.jp.

$ host -t NS nara.kindai.ac.jp
nara.kindai.ac.jp. name server ns.nara.kindai.ac.jp.
nara.kindai.ac.jp. name server rs6000.cc.kindai.ac.jp.

Okay, so the ONE server that services irm is also used by it's parent domain -- but irm only has *ONE*. The parent domain, which you're capable of posting from, has a second NS. Which means when the common NS is down, nara can still be resolved, but irm cannot.

Call me skeptical, but I suspect that ns.nara.kindai.ac.jp has a serious reliability issue.

Who runs a domain off of a SINGLE nameserver anyway? Whoever manages the domain is setting themselves up for problems like this. THAT decision certainly cannot be blamed on the procmail list...

but it wouldn't surprise me if there are many, many people worldwide who don't have that luxury and are being denied access to the list.

FWIW, they'd be denied access to a great many mail servers. You just might have been fortunate enough not to run into the problem elsewhere. I can assure you that if you send ME a message at the same time that the procmail server was refusing your messages, my servers would be refusing it too...

I tried.  If no one cares or knows what to do about it, then that's the end
of it.

It is neither a procmail issue or an issue with the list server for this discussion list, which is configured much like any other sendmail config with an intent on eliminating spew - refusing to accept mail from hosts which do not resolve is a pretty basic sendmail rule, and isn't uncommon in recent (as in distros < 3 years old) sendmails.

---
 Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering

 Procmail disclaimer: <http://www.professional.org/procmail/disclaimer.html>
 Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies.  I'll get my copy from the list.

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