DNS Question

[peter@mxtoolbox.com]

I put this in the installation forum even though I have an existing setup which was working great until 1am last night.

My Zimbra server is also running BIND and is acting as a DNS slave server for my domain. My primary DNS service provider changed it's nameserver's IP addresses a while back and so the server, acting as a slave, was unable to update it's zone file. After the SOA expiration hit last night, it was no longer an authority for my domain. I unfortunately had /etc/resolv.conf set to only look to 127.0.0.1 for DNS (yes I know that's retarded and I've fixed that).

My question is why mail that got to the Zimbra server was unable to be delivered into the mailboxes since I had an entry for itself in the /etc/hosts file?

Here's was /var/log/maillog was reporting. I have the replaced the customer with example.com and our domain with domain.com.

Jul 23 00:43:18 zim1 postfix/qmgr[16449]: 34C791570725: to=, relay=none, delay=0, status=deferred (delivery temporarily suspended: Host or domain name not found. Name service error for name=zim1.domain.com type=A: Host not found, try again)

Any input as to why /etc/hosts wasn't enough to satisfy postfix would be appreciated.

Peter

[phoenix]

The simple answer is that Postfix uses DNS (as the error indicates) to lookup the server address not the hosts file.