Sendmail connecting to itself! Help?

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Please help me with this problem if you can.  I am trying to get sendmail to
send to other hosts on the internet.  I am running AIX PS/2 1.2 on a PS/2
Model 70.  Everything works fine except outbound mail.  It seems that sendmail
connects back to the same machine instead of the destination machine:

AIX instfe 2.1> mail -v jew at alpha
Subject: Test
This is one.
.
Cc: 
jew at alpha... Connecting to alpha.sunquest.com (tcp)...
220 instfe.sunquest.com Sendmail 5.61-AIX-1.2/1.0 ready at Wed, 3 Apr 91 13:14:1
9 -0700
>>> HELO instfe.sunquest.com
553 Local configuration error, hostname not recognized as local
>>> QUIT
221 instfe.sunquest.com closing connection
jew at alpha... Service unavailable: No such file or directory
Saving message in /u/jew/dead.letter
/u/jew/dead.letter... Sent

Now alpha is a VMS host running SMTP.  I included it as an example because
it is more informative than:

AIX instfe 2.1> mail -v jew at rt
Subject: Test
This is another one.
.
Cc: 
jew at rt... Connecting to rt.sunquest.com (tcp)...
jew at rt... Host unknown
Saving message in /u/jew/dead.letter
/u/jew/dead.letter... Sent


I know what you're thinking!  He can't reach the other hosts, right!  No,
I can telnet, rlogin, ftp, and anything else you can imagine except send
mail to them:

AIX instfe 2.1> ping rt
PING rt.sunquest.com: 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.12.52.50: icmp_seq=0. time=0. ms

----rt.sunquest.com PING Statistics----
1 packets transmitted, 1 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip (ms)  min/avg/max = 0/0/0


Please point me in the right direction if you can and thanks for bearing
with me in any case!  Any help will be much appreciated and thanks in
advance!

J. E. Ward	jew at sunquest.com

Confucious say...
Be security conscious -- National Defense is at stake.