"The Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

Upgrade Kills Name Server

From Anonymous on Fri, 25 Dec 1998

I just upgraded"= to Red Hat 5.2 and set up everything as I had it before and now I get the following:

fetchmail: POP3 connection to mail.nashville.com failed: temporary name server error

Netscape can't recognize mail.nashville.com either. I am having to send this from Windows email.

My etc/hosts file looks the same as it did before. What other files do I need to check and/or post?

Thanks!!

I'm just going to guess that the upgrade renamed some of your files (probably your DNS zone files, possible even your /etc/resolve.conf) to add the 'rpmorig' extension.

So, search for rpmorig files and look for the files that were put in place of them. You'll have to manually resolve the differences. (Use the 'diff' program).

I've complained to them before about their penchant for moving your files out of the way when they to a upgrades. Their concern is that the old configuration files may be incompatible with the new ones. I've said that the disruption caused by users doing an upgrade when they never realized or tracked which files there changed and "configured" tends to outweigh the chances that a new package upgrade will completely fail when presented with an older format of its own configuration file.

One problem to consider is that you old version of Linux may have been running BIND 4.9.x or earlier (I'm guessing that your system is providing it's own DNS services). The new version (5.2) might be installing BIND 8.1.2. These do have incompatible file formats for the base configuration file --- however the name has chagned too. The old one used named.boot. The new version uses /etc/named.conf. There is a utility with the package to convert a named.boot file to named.conf format. Actually the new format is much easier to set up.

Anyway it is almost certain that you need to configure your 'named' (BIND).

Unix mail doesn't normally refer to your /etc/hosts file since that can't convey information about MX records and preferences. SMTP mail routing is done via MX records --- not by host address (A) records. So it doesn't matter what your /etc/hosts file look like for this.

Copyright © 1999, James T. Dennis
Published in The Linux Gazette Issue 36 January 1999

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