[lug] Cron problem

[Mark Sweitzer]

I've been using Cron on a few Fedora-9 servers to run automated daily
backups.
For a few years, Crontab has been configured with the "mailto=" command
directed to an address in a domain not related to the respective host
machines. (The hosts have retained the default "localhost" name, with no
domain association.)

Recently, these servers have stopped sending confirmation messages from cron
daemon to this designated email address, all simultaneously on the same day,
and never again since that day. These servers are in different cities and
not WAN-connected. The log files for cron indicated that the attempted
message sending everyday was undeliverable.

In an attempt to troubleshoot, I changed the "mailto=" to addresses from an
entirely different domain, yet the results were still unsuccessfully
delivered. So now I'm stumped.

Any clues on this would be helpful. Sendmail service is running on these
machines. How does sendmail utilize an SMTP server to access up-to-date DNS
MX records to direct these attempted messages, and why did it work
successfully on several machines before, over a span of years? I never
configured them to a specific SMTP server address. These machines are inside
of a firewall and have hard-coded NAT IP addresses and nameserver addresses
in their ifconfigs.

Thanks for any assistance on this.

Mark
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