I have a small home network of just two machines. Machine1 runs Debian Testing with Exim and Procmail. Machine2 is running Mandrake 9 with Postfix.
I have just spent about two half-days trying to set things up so that I can send mail from one machine to another. After having spent hours searching for information on both my own machine and on the Internet I have to admit defeat.
When I try to send mail from a user on either machine to a user on the other I get the following message:
'Host lookup did not complete'
/etc/hosts.conf on both machines:
order hosts,bind multi on
/etc/hosts on machine1: 127.0.0.1 localhost 192.168.1.1 machine1.mynetwork machine1 192.168.1.2 machine2.mynetwork machine2
# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts # (added automatically by netbase upgrade)
::1 ip6-localhost ip6-loopback fe00::0 ip6-localnet ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix ff02::1 ip6-allnodes ff02::2 ip6-allrouters ff02::3 ip6-allhosts
Surely it can't be this difficult? I should add that a lot of the information I have read might just as well have been written in Swahili for all the sense it made.
After a very, very, very frustrating 24 hours I can appreciate why some people would give up on Linux and go back to Windows.
Am I missing an important bit of software?
Barry Samuels Professional Defeatist