Re: How to get information about your system and network for setting up gnus email

[spamtrap@koldfront.dk (Adam Sjøgren)]

On 16 Sep 2002 08:08:43 -0400, Don Saklad wrote:

> I've seen people with expertise do this to their delight !  It just
> doesn't make any sense that the information isn't available except
> by oral accounts.

The people that have impressed you so much by doing this have
undoubtly been guessing.

The reason that they have been successful is probably that there are
de-facto standards for what mailservers are called. Usually people
call them "mail.[domain]", "smtp.[domain", "pop.[domain]" or similar.

Guessing, for instance, that pop.ai.mit.edu is a mailserver serving
mail via POP for ai.mit.edu is not a far out guess, because
pop.ai.mit.edu exists. Same thing goes for news.ai.mit.edu and
mail.ai.mit.edu.

Incidently those three guesses might be appropriate for your specific
setup at ai.mit.edu.

But I must stress: These are *guesses*. The only authoritative way to
get the *correct* answer is to get the information for the people
responsible for the news and mailservers you need to use.

> The question is what are some of those files or commands?....

If you want to know whether your guess on a hostname is a name
associated with a machine, you can look it up in the Domain Name
System, DNS.

On most unix machines you can use the command "host" to do this.

For instance:

 $ host mail.ai.mit.edu
 mail.ai.mit.edu         CNAME   life.ai.mit.edu
 life.ai.mit.edu         A       128.52.32.80
 $ 

tells you that there is actually a machine that is supposed to respond
to the name "mail.ai.mit.edu".

If, on the other hand, you try to look up a non-existing machine with
the "host" command, you get something similar to this:

 $ host donsbox.ai.mit.edu
 donsbox.ai.mit.edu A record currently not present
 $

That way one can educate ones guesses. But they're still nothing more
than guesses.


  Best regards,

-- 
 "Så har den første snøen falt                                 Adam Sjøgren
  men det er ikkje derfor det er kaldt"                   asjo@koldfront.dk