Make sendmail work from a computer using Airport

Oct 10, '03 10:20:00AM

Contributed by: lewildbeast

Since upgrading to a TiBook a while ago, my old Lombard has been sitting around. I recently decided to put it to some use as a mail server. Both TiBook and Lombard are connected to the Airport which maintains the internet connection with dynamic IP address. Sendmail had been enabled properly with instructions off the net.

Anyway, the problem that I had was that I could send mails from my TiBook to my Lombard from behind the Airport, but I could not recieve mail from the internet! This implied that sendmail was working (since it permitted outbound emails but not inbound emails). After several days of agnozing, I realized the problem arose because the mail server would assume the Rendezvous address (e.g. 10.0.1.112), and not the address of the mail server (e.g test.ath.cx).

I localized the problem to the following files: hostconfig and boot.rc. To make your sendmail work properly:

  1. Remember to back up your files first. (sudo cp /etc/hostconfig /etc/hostconfig.original; sudo cp /etc/rc.boot /etc/rc.boot.original).

  2. Edit /etc/hostconfig as root: (ie. sudo pico /etc/hostconfig). Under # network configuration, change HOSTNAME=-AUTOMATIC- to HOSTNAME-test.ath.cx- (or whatever your hostname is).

  3. Edit /etc/rc.boot as root: (ie. sudo pico /etc/rc.boot). Under hostname localhost (you will have to scroll down quite a bit or use control-W to search), change localost to the hostname used in the previous step.

  4. Reboot
[robg adds: I haven't tested this one...]

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