Linux-Hams archive - January 1997: Re: Sendmail and two smart hosts

Re: Sendmail and two smart hosts

David Brooke (soaijco.ykanbbi@aorta.net)
Sun, 12 Jan 1997 21:55:21 GMT


In article <tgcvzx@extraprise.com>,
zfb@mailit.tunk.net (Dave J Brown) writes:
>for themselves. i.e. if I ran gb7pit.ampr.org folks could 'subdomain' from
>within there.... m1aax.gb7pit.ampr.org etc, then there could be a wildcard MX
>for *.gb7pit.ampr.org ..... blah blah!

Except that if these hosts had any other DNS records (such as A or CNAME)
the wildcard MX record would be ignored. They are only valid for names
which have no other records at all. This seems to be a little known
aspect of DNS.

[UK aside: This is why I have repeatedly disputed the "easier
mail routing" argument for the <host>.<region>.uk.ampr.org names
proposed at UKIP meetings despite nobody seeming to listen! An MX for
*.<region>.uk.ampr.org won't work for hosts that have A records which
is probably all of them.]

>Why don't you deliver direct? Unless you are using the 'real' DNS you could
>even hack up a wildcard *.ampr.org MX record to point at your smarthost.

Subject to limitations in my comment above. I actually do use a few
local hacks to DNS at the moment to assist mail routing but they need
to be explicit MX entries, not wildcards.

Regards, Dave