sendmail & realtime blackholes?

[Robert Meyer]

I'm not sure about the RBL portion but I do know that if it can't look
something up, it won't use it.  From the sound of things, something broke their
DNS entry on the root name servers.  How did you find the IP of their DNS
server?

Normally, a DNS server will try to resolve a name/address locally and then
forward it to whomever is identified as the forwarder.  If no forwarder is
specified, it will go to the root name servers and then the root will forward
down to the right server.  Make sure that your resolver isn't caching the
results of the lookup.  I know that Sun workstations and servers will freqently
have 'nscd' running which is the name server cache daemon.  If that's running,
lookups tend to get weird on machines change their addresses.

Hope this helps...

Cheers!

Bob
--- Darin Perusich <Darin.Perusich at cognigencorp.com> wrote:
> does anyone have experience setting up sendmail, or any other MTA for
> that matter with the Mail Abuse Prevention System's Realtime Blackhole
> List from mail-abuse.org? it's simple enough to configure sendmail to
> use it, just add FEATURE(dnsbl) to your sendmail.mc before you run m4
> against it, this i've done. i'm trying to test the feature and it
> doesn't appear to be doing the lookup. instructions are located at
> http://www.mail-abuse.org/rbl/usage.html#DNSuse and it should be really
> straight forward. 
> 
> something else that i'm finding bizarre, when i do an nslookup on
> blackholes.mail-abuse.org the lookup fails. regardless of what name
> server i use, unless i use the mail-abuse.org name server which tells me
> there are 3 machines serving that host. now dns by it's nature should
> just pass my lookup along until it locates the host, if it's configured
> correctly .
> 
> anyone have any ideas?
> 
> -- 
> Darin Perusich
> Unix Systems Administrator
> Cognigen Corp.
> darinper at cognigencorp.com


=====
Bob Meyer
Knightwing Communications, Inc.
36 Cayuga Blvd
Depew, NY 14043
Phone: 716-308-8931 or 716-681-0076
Meyer_RM at Yahoo.com

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