Sendmai, SMART_HOST, and MX Records. Oh my!

[adameros]

Is there some way to make sendmail disregard MX record when sending to a SMART_HOST?

The issue is we have our main mail cluster, named mxhost1. It is the MX host in dns for all internal systems.

We have a special one for some of the system called mxhost3. On some hosts we specify mxhost3 as the SMART_HOST.

On the special servers I run "sendmail -bv someemailaddress". It returns that it will relay through mxhost3.

Here is where the problem comes up. Rather than go off the SMART_HOST setting exclusively, sendmail sees that mxhost1 is the MX host for mxhost3.

Is this expected behavior? This cost me several hours today debugging this and it seems like a silly thing to essentially over ride the SMART_HOST setting.

[Lakshmipathi]

I'm not sure whether i understood your problem correctly,
If you want to use mxhost3 as SMART_HOST try the following

1) Make sure local sendmail port 25 is not blocked & Add ip address of remote machine in /etc/hosts file
#vi /etc/hosts
12.167.43.44 mxhost3.xxx.com xxxcomdev

2) In sendmail.mc provide your sendmail server name and make sure DAEMON_OPTIONS is commented,

#vi /etc/mail/sendmail.mc

define(`SMART_HOST',`mxhost3.xxx.com')

dnl DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Port=smtp,Addr=127.0.0.1, Name=MTA')dnl

3)creat new configuration file using following command,
#m4 sendmail.mc > sendmail.cf

4)Restart the sendmail program.
#service sendmail restart

HTH