php, mail(), or sendmail issue??

[untoldone]

hi, i resently set up phpnuke on my site, it works fine except the page hangs whenever the mail function is called. The mail gets queued in /var/spool/clientmqueue by php im assuming with many other random system messages, but none of them ever leave that directory or get sent, along with another file for each message that i think is some form of status of the email, one thing that cought my eye in the "status" files was:

MDeferred: Connection timed out with localhost.bluenodes.com.

bluenodes.com is my domain and has the ip 127.0.0.1 in my hosts file, but i have no clue why its trying to connect to localhost.bluenodes.com in the first place. This doesnt work because it looks up the ip of my router and not my local machine and as a result the connection times out. i have tried adding localhost.bluenodes.com to the hosts file, but it didnt do anything. Anyone have any ideas?

im running all the servers localy and have the following setup:
redhat8
whateve version of sendmail that comes with redhat8
php 4.2.2-8.0.5
phpnuke 6.0
apache 2.0.40 i think

thanks much
:confused:

[Thanatos]

hm, you're probably going to have to edit your sendmail.conf file. I use postfix, which is quite nice. You can check out my postfix faq and see if it helps you--the logic should be more or less the same, though the conf a little different. go to www.theted.org and check on linux in the right hand column....if you can't find it/need more help, let me know.

www.theted.org

[untoldone]

ha-ha success ... well kinda ... i still dont know why sendmail was trying to make a connection to localhost.bluenodes.com but it was a problem with sendmail ... the reason me editing the hosts file did nothing was because sendmail ignores the host file and relies completely on DNS ... unless the file /etc/mail/service.switch exsists with

hosts files dns

in it. This tells sendmail to look at the hosts file be4 DNS. Thats really all it took.