sendmail sometimes refuses connections.. anyone have simular problem

[Julian Field]

At 15:59 12/07/2002, you wrote:
>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)

The cron job is just to check that MailScanner hasn't completely died. By
default it also restarts itself every 4 hours to prevent resource leaks.

> > 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
>----------------
>Electronic Group - http://www.electronic-group.com

--
Julian Field                Teaching Systems Manager
jkf at ecs.soton.ac.uk         Dept. of Electronics & Computer Science
Tel. 023 8059 2817          University of Southampton
                             Southampton SO17 1BJ