🚀 go-pugleaf

	 
	   We have an NRS registered site name `planet.bt.co.uk', behind which
	a number of machines (workstations, development machines, general 
	purpose minis etc) are hidden. It is impractical for us to maintain
	a list of machines in the local domain on every slave.  We therefore 

Hmmm. we have about 100 names allocated; not all of them represent real
machines at any one time. We have pre-allocated internet numbers and 
everything else for all these names, and put that standard set on
all hosts, so, no maintainance problems.
In fact we only have about 30 workstations, hosts etc at any time, plus
dozens of other network devices such as terminal concentrators, gateways
to Appletalk nets, etc..

	route all mail for the local domain (but not for the local host) 
	through a server which holds the full list of hosts and user aliases.
	 
	   This scenario is very similar to that given in the examples, so we
	based our tables on the cs.glasgow ones. The only significant difference
	was that we tried to put a wildcard entry in the local channel table:
	 
			%s.planet.bt.co.uk	local_gateway
If local_gateway is across the ethernet, this entry should be in the ether
channel table ...
	 
	   I assume (are these reasonable?) the following interpretations for
	local domain addresses used on the slave machine:
	1	user					Local delivery
	2	user@localhost				Ditto
	3	user@localhost.planet.bt.co.uk		Ditto
	4	user@planet				Via server to preferred host
	5	user@planet.bt.co.uk			Ditto
	6	user@otherhost				Via server to specified host
	7	user@otherhost.planet.bt.co.uk		Ditto
	 
	   Addresses 1,3,4 and 6 work as expected.
	   Address 2 is not recognised as local unless LHOST is included in the
		local channel table - otherwise it goes out via the server.
This is the expected behaviour ...

	   Address 5 is stripped unconditionally in ruleset 0 and delivered 
		locally.

This is also as expected - all users in the local DOMAIN must be in the alias
file if they do not get mail on the local HOST.
If you have problems keeping your Alias databse up to date, fetch the
request sources; topic aliases
package from info-server@uk.ac.gla.cs

	   Address 7 was intended to be caught by the wildcard; unfortunately
		all wildcard entries are appended to ruleset 16, and the address
		is rejected by ruleset 17 before the match can occur. The result
		is <Error: Local Domain Unknown>.
	 
The 'slave' example in the distribution would send this to the 'master'.
What particular rule in S17 is rejecting it ? Is it a rule generated from
the wildcard entry in local.chn above, which should be in ether.chn ?

	    My interpretations seem to be shared by the majority of the users
	on site, so if they are wrong my life is going to become very difficult.
	I have hacked the sendmail.cf by hand to achieve the desired behaviour,
What did you do to it ? 
	but I would be interested to know whether uksendmail can (should?) 
	handle this set-up without such intervention. Have I done something
	wrong?
	 
	    If anyone can shed some light - many thanks.
The documentation fails to point out that the order of entries in the
config.site file is significant; you can re-arrange these lines to get
wildcards into the correct order to avoid

file1
-----
uk.%s		relay1

file2
-----
uk.ac.%s	relay2

and so forth.
	 
-jem.