Re: flexfax: Hylafax email gateway & other newbie questions

[David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>]

> Slackware 2.0.30

There is no such Linux distribution.  A current Slackware would be 3.x,
I think.  2.0.30 is a recent kernel, but says nothing about the utilities
and libraries.

> Sendmail 8.8.8

> never being run. The messages are just sitting in the sendmail que with 
> "host lookup deferred"

There is no such string in sendmail 8.8.8; the nearest two are:

        /*
        **  If we are running without a regular network connection (usually
        **  dial-on-demand) and we are just queueing, we want to avoid DNS
        **  lookups because those could try to connect to a server.
        */

        if (CurEnv->e_sendmode == SM_DEFER)
        {
                if (tTd(9, 1))
                        printf("host_map_lookup(%s) => DEFERRED\n", name);
                *statp = EX_TEMPFAIL;
                return NULL;
        }
 
This would mean you had deliberately configured for offline operation, and
mail will not move until you do an explicit queue run.

And:

                                "%.80s map: lookup (%s): deferred",
    
where %.80s can be any of the sendmail map names, including "host", and
%s is the name it is trying to translate.  This happens on any temporary
map lookup failure, e.g., for the host map, if the route to the outside
DNS server is down, as is the typical case for dialup sites.

>                         Are there specific permissions to be set on the 
> mailfax script, should it be called mailfax.sh or is mailfax ok. What am 
> I doing wrong ( Am I being stupid? )

The status message is consistent with sendmail not even trying to invoke
faxmail.

However, I think this shows up an over simplication in the sendmail rules
for faxmail, which is possibly sufficiently important to justify its
own message.  (Basically, a bogus domain, like fax, is always going to
fail a DNS lookup, and therefore generate an excess DNS load.)