mail to CERN

[Richard Gilbert]

I have spent some time recently trying to get to grips with UK Sendmail
after inheriting rather a mess from somebody who left.
I now have a fairly coherent set of .dom and .chn files.
Most things seem to work fine but I am rather confused by mail to CERN.
There is the specific case of ch.cern.cernvm which is registered for direct
JANET mail in the NRS and there is also the general case of mail to ch.cern.xxx
which should be sent via mhs-relay. There is no entry in any of the .dom files
generated by c-nrs for ch.cern.cernvm (although c-nrs produces two entries in
junk.dom, namely au and ch -- I assume that these are because there are entries
in the NRS in MAIL-NIFTP context in these domains). The file top.dom produced
by c-nrs contains the following entries:

cern ean.ac.uk
ch mhs.ac.uk
cern.ch mhs.ac.uk

(The first line looks obsolete while the third looks redundant).

Running sendmail in test mode I obtain the following results:

u...@ch.cern.cernvm => u...@cernvm.cern.ch.TOP_LEVEL_DOM
u...@ch.cern => u%ch.cern@ean
u...@cern.ch => u...@cern.ch.TOP_LEVEL_DOM

The .TOP_LEVEL_DOM is appended by Ruleset 10 which contains:

R$*dnd.ca $1dnd.ca.TOP_LEVEL_DOM
$*cern.ch $1cern.ch.TOP_LEVEL_DOM

ca.dnd and ch.cern are the only two entries in the Partial Domains part of
the NRS which have more than one component. Here are the entries for Canadian
domains. Presumably a similar problem would occur here too.

ca mhs.ac.uk
dnd.ca nsf.ac.uk
cdn ean.ac.uk

Can anyone explain what I need in the various files to make mail to
ch.cern.cernvm go directly and mail to ch.cern.xxx go via mhs-relay?

One final question: we apparently have to edit the line

uk uk

into top.dom to get mail to fully qualified uk addresses to work.
Is this to be expected?

Thank you in anticipation.

Richard Gilbert