How to get mail to local destinations delivered?

[Chris G]

On Sun, Nov 11, 2007 at 04:13:04AM +0900, John Summerfield wrote:
> Chris G wrote:
>> I have a fairly default Fedora 7 installation, certainly the sendmail
>> is just as it was installed.
>> How do I get sendmail to deliver mail to local destinations?  The
>> system's hostname is home.isbd.net and it's connected to the Internet
>> via a router.  I have a CNAME set up at the hosting provider that
>> hosts isbd.net to point at the static address of my ADSL connection.
>> When I send mail from my system to a local address it gets the
>> hostname added, thus mail gets sent to root at home.isbd.net,
>> postmaster at home.isbd.net, chris at home.isbd.net, etc.  All of this
>> fails because sendmail attempts to connect to the SMTP port of
>> home.isbd.net, which isn't possible because my router's firewall
>> doesn't accept connections on port 25.
>> I don't want to open up port 25 and it seems a bit silly anyway to
>> send mail on such a long round trip.  Is there any way I can tell
>> sendmail that home.isbd.net is localhost (or 192.168.1.1)?  I have an
>> entry for home.isbd.net in my /etc/hosts file which is:-
>>     192.168.1.1     home    home.isbd.net
>> but obviously sendmail is doing a DNS lookup for home.isbd.net which
> Don't confuse "resolver" with DNS. The resolver uses a variety of services, 
> one of which may be DNS.
>> returns the 'external' IP address.
>
>
> I don't know whether sendmail or other MTAs work with hosts files, I've not 
> used them for ten years or so.
>
> I do something a little more educational.
>
> What I do is, first, choose my own top level domain. You've already found 
> problems with using someone else's domain, such as your IAPs.
>
It isn't "someone else's domain", it's mine!  I have used a perfectly
good way of telling my domain's main host that there is a subdomain
elsewhere.

> First, I set up bind. You need the bind and caching-nameserver packages. 
> Add a zone for example.lan covering the IP addresses you chose. I chose 
> thematic names, Australian animals.
>
> Second, set up a DHCP server to hand out IP addresses from your range. The 
> DHCP server listens to interfaces on the subnets you define, and ignores 
> others. This point once had me confused.
>
> 2a If you want to dest that this much is working, boot a rescue CD or 2a 
> Knoppix on a client computer and check that it gets an IP address.
>
> Third, configure your clients to configure their networks using DHCP. With 
> this setup, some will change their names, some won't. I don't worry about 
> it
>
> Fifth (actually, at any time), configure sendmail (or exim or postfix) on 
> the server to listen to the LAN for incoming mail. If you don't understand 
> sendmail, postfix is fairly simple to set up, good for beginners and good 
> enough for quite large offices.
>
> Sixth About this time, users with shell accounts on the server can receive 
> mail there. You will want something to serve it out, dovecot does it quite 
> well. If, like me, you use lots of computers, you might want to configure 
> it to do imap.
>
This is total overkill for my actual requirement (which maybe I
should have stated at the outset), I simply want mail to root on my
Fedora machine to get sent to me rather than having to become root to
read it.  No other mail is sent or read on this machine.

-- 
Chris Green