As of today, I can send, but not receive, email on my linode. I am the only person with server access, and no changes were made. It worked last night before I went to sleep - no longer works today.


Here's the bounceback error I'm receiving:

"<gremmy@li14-195.li14-195> (expanded from <dmg@dm-gremlin.com>): Host or domain
name not found. Name service error for name=li14-195.li14-195 type=A: Host
not found"

I've gotten limited help from tech support, concluding with the following statement:

"The problem you are having is because your mail aliases are being expanded to the incorrect name "li14-195.li14-195", rather than "li14-195.members.linode.com", or another valid name for your Linode."

The last email I received on my system appears to have been right before the linode outage that caused the graph dead time this morning. Tech support said:

"An incorrect or NXDOMAIN record may have been cached by your server for the name li14-195.members.linode.com during the outage."

I don't know how to check to see if that's the case, or to correct this if it is the case.


Tech support also said the following:

"That the name is showing up as li14-195.li14-195 is quite strange. You may want check your "/etc/resolv.conf" to ensure that your search and domain options are set to "members.linode.com". If you already have the correct settings in your "/etc/resolv.conf" you may want to add:

64.71.152.195 li14-195.li14-195

To your "/etc/hosts" file as a temporary fix."

I tried to do this, rebooted, but no change.


Here's the contents of the two files tech support suggested I check:

etc/resolv.conf:

; generated by /sbin/dhclient-script
search members.linode.com
nameserver 74.207.241.5
nameserver 74.207.242.5


etc/hosts, with the very last line being what tech support advised me to add:

# Do not remove the following line, or various programs
# that require network functionality will fail.
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
64.71.152.195 li14-195.li14-195

I'm extremely inexpert at this, am not the person who originally configured the server, and can not look at this information and know if it's correct or not.

Any assistance will be very much appreciated. Files to look in, what the cause of this problem might be, etc. I'm way out of my league of knowledge here as to where to look for a solution.

Thank you.

I'm trying to troubleshoot the alias thing. Upon running the "newaliases" command in console, I get this error:

My hostname li14-195 is not a fully qualified name - set myhostname or mydomain in /etc/postfix/main.cf

In /etc/postfix/main.cf, where should I be defining this? I see references to myhostname and mydomain, but I am not sure exactly what to change.

Does this help clear up anything about where the problem is happening? I can provide the contents of the main.cf file if that would be helpful.

Thank you.

I think fundamentally you need a proper short hostname. See this thread: http://www.linode.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=5615 where I tried to explain the short hostname and FQDN there.

It's derived from the Getting Started Guide

Then once you set your hostname and DNS "A" record, you need to set up the reverse DNS through the Linode Manager for proper mail handling:

And did you follow a particular Email guide?

On a properly configured system you normally don't need to set either of those two parameters in postfix - they will derive their default values from the system's FQDN. If you tell us which linux distro you are using, I'm sure someone can help you sort out setting your system's FQDN.

Oh and lose the "64.71.152.195 li14-195.li14-195" line from /etc/hosts - that is not a proper fix for anything.