Ultrix 4.0 sendmail MX handling

[Louis A. Mamakos]

Has anyone else noticed problems with MX forwarding in sendmail?  Here's
the problem that I've had:

In the DNS, there are some MX records for TRANTOR.UMD.EDU:

TRANTOR.UMD.EDU	IN	MX	10 TRANTOR.UMD.EDU.
		IN	MX	20 CAMELOT.UMD.EDU.

Now, camelot is the Ultrix 4.0 machine.  TRANTOR.UMD.EDU goes down over the
weekend, so mail is delivered to CAMELOT.UMD.EDU.  CAMELOT attempts delivery
of the message, first trying TRANTOR, which of course fails since its down.
It then opens a connected to itself, which is the problem.  It should trim the
list of MX forwarders to those with lower preferences than itself (and this
indeed happens in the regular Berkeley 5.61 and some earlier versions).

Funny thing is, this used to work just fine under Ultrix 3.something.  Since
we don't have sources yet (grr...) I installed the Berkeley sendmail.  I'd
like to run the Ultrix version with the Hesoid support, but this is a real
problem which needs to be resolved.

louie