sendmail sometimes refuses connections.. anyone have simular problem

[Marc Perea]

On Fri, 12 Jul 2002 10:35:50 -0400
Matt Doherty <Matthew_doherty at DATAWATCH.COM> wrote:

>
> I know mailscanner runs a script every hour via cron to check its pid..
> I'm wondering if it sometimes has difficulty starting the sendmail
> daemon if it had to..

My understood is that mailscanner doesn't do anything with sendmail every
hour. It only restarts himself to prevent memory leaks. (Correct me if I'm
wrong)

> I'm not quite sure why this happens. I have read my maillogs, xfer logs,
> kernal messages, and find nothing to conclude this issue. This morning I
> started to receive calls that sendmail was down. Our web based email
> could send mail but client email programs were being refused..
> Obviousley that ment sendmail was running fine right? I restarted
> Mailscanner for the hell of it, and now both web based mail and client
> email clients can send.. So its gotta be sendmail right? or maybe it had
> some effect on the xinitd? Anyone here know this problem? This has been
> happening on and off ever since I installed mailscanner. Though it could
> be a coincidence that it started after the install, I'm not sure.
>

That probably means that your sendmail stopped to be in background
listening for connections in port 25, that's why the client email programs
cannot remotely access to it, but the webmail program (that I suppose it
was running on the same machine) was still able to send emails directly
invoking /usr/sbin/sendmail in foreground mode.

The next time it happens to you, try to list the listening sockets, and
the processes ... I'm sure it will help you to diagnose the problem! :)

Hope that helps you.

Cheers,

--
Marc Perea - System Administration Staff
Mail: marc.perea at electronic-group.com
Tel:  (+34) 93 600 23 23
Fax:  (+34) 93 600 23 10
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