Hi all,

I've been searching the net for days now trying to get an answer/fix to
this problem.
I have several FreeBSD servers running different versions from 4.11 to
6.1 with different versions of sendmail. (i have upgraded a couple to
8.13.8 to test the latest version hasnt fixed anything) They all have
the following problem:

Our LAN is on a private subnet, behind a NAT enabled firewall. the DNS
servers on this subnet are MS Windows 2000 domain controllers, that are
configured as forwarders to our public DNS servers (not on the local
subnet). All servers on the LAN subnet use these servers without
problem for name resolution.

However, I have root's messages aliases to my email account, and when
the FreeBSD servers try and send mail to it, i get a "host name lookup
failure" error message. AFTER it lists all the correct mailservers
listed in the MX records of the domain my account is on.

If i configure the boxes to query the public servers in resolv.conf and
not the local ones, it works fine!

The public dns servers are authorititive for the domain my email
account is on.

Microsoft domain = domain.local
BSD servers hostnames = bsd1.domain.net
My email address = me@doamin.net

Any would be greatly appreciated, as the machines need to
reference some of the other local boxes using their local DNS names, I
dont want to maintain complicated hosts files on a large number of
servers and it would be a security risk to add a secondary copy of the
private dns domain to the publice servers.

Regards,

Paul