[vox-tech] Perl programming problem

[Mitch Patenaude]

On Jan 13, 2005, at 1:46 PM, Richard S. Crawford wrote:
> Actually, I do.  Here is the relevant code:
>
> my $fromAddress='rcrawford at unexmail.ucdavis.edu';
> my $toAddress='rcrawford at unexmail.ucdavis.edu';
> my $body="Neo is down as of $timeString\n";
> my $mailer=open ({From => $fromAddress, To => toAddress, 
> Subject=>$subject});
> print $mailer $body;
> $mailer->close();

The PERL module you are using is almost certainly just passing off the 
mail to your underlying Mail Transport Agent (MTA).  It looks like your 
home machine's MTA isn't configured correctly.  You can try to send the 
mail directly from the command line with the command mail.  Type is 
'mail rcrawford at unexmail.ucdavis.edu' at the command line, type in a 
message, and terminate with a single period on a line by itself. (the 
way email used to be done in the old days :-)  If that works, then the 
MTA is configured correctly.

If it isn't configured correctly.. then you'll need to configure you 
MTA. In the old days that would have been sendmail, configured with a 
file like /etc/sendmail/sendmail.cf, though I wouldn't recommend 
sendmail now.  On my Mandrake 8.1 box it's postfix, and I think you can 
configure it by editing the file /etc/postfix/main.cf, and 
uncommenting/changing the lines for mydomain.  (by default it pulls it 
from the gethostname() library call, but that isn't set up correctly on 
most small home boxes, and therefore returns 'localhost.localdomain' by 
default.)

If your MTA is something else (like qmail), then you'll have to figure 
out how to configure it properly for that MTA.. a google search should 
do you well there.

Alternately, you could set up your machine so that gethostname(3) 
returns the proper value.  That's going to be distro dependent.... I'm 
not even sure how on my Mandrake box frankly.

   -- Mitch