[Pkg-exim4-users] After upgrading to exim4 messages are frozen, "remote host address is the local host"

[Marc Haber]

On Mon, Mar 07, 2005 at 03:41:05PM +0100, Matthew Exon wrote:
> OK, I figured out what my problem was.  I didn't read the entire dialog 
> box carefully enough and missed that the list of local domains had to be 
> colon separated.  I entered them space separated.  As a result, exim 
> believed that it should only be handling mail for the domain 
> "exon.dyndns.org<space>aeon.exon.dyndns.org", and rejected any email 
> merely destined for exon.dyndns.org.

I see. Great that you found the issue.
> It seems like the first check that should be made, when a user enters a 
> list of domains, is that each of the domains should be looked up to see 
> if they really exist.  If not, the user should be warned.  Ideally this 
> would be handled by debconf.

Well, maybe you are preparing your mail server to accept e-mail for a
domain that has not yet been put into service. This is normal way of
operation for bigger sites.

> Again, ideally, exim would also perform this check when it starts up, 
> and figure out some way to warn postmaster if there's a problem.

I would put these checks in the update-exim4.conf script which is
invoked right before exim4 starts up. This is the logical way to do
it, at the price of not being able to use Debconf for the warning.

otoh, I do not think that it is possible with reasonable effort to do
tests that will catch most possible errors. As I outlined above, there
might be justification for using a domain that does not yet exist in a
domain list. It would be reasonably easy to check whether a domain
list is correctly separated with colons, avoiding your mistake, but
there are gazillions of other possibilities to break a setup. I
believe it is impossible to catch all of them. So adding a check for
this mistake is like opening a can of worms which I would really like
to avoid.

> For Exim 4, correctly configured: too much to attach.  Suffice to say, 
> it works :-)

Fine ;)

Greetings
Marc

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