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Postfix problem

  • 07-05-2006 10:58PM
    #1
    oscarBravo
    Technology & Internet Moderators Posts: 28,862 Mod ✭✭✭✭


    I don't know why, but this problem cropped up all of a sudden. I'm running my own IMAP server at home, using fetchmail to poll several POP3 servers, handing the mail off to postfix, which delivers it through procmail. For no apparent reason, postfix has started playing silly buggers.

    Fetchmail reports "SMTP connect to localhost failed". When I try to "telnet localhost 25", I don't get any response. And yet, I can see postfix is running, and "lsof -i" shows me "master" listening on port 25.

    Any ideas? I badly need to get access to my mail!


Comments

  • #2
    oscarBravo
    Technology & Internet Moderators Posts: 28,862 Mod ✭✭✭✭oscarBravo


    Just to confuse matters further, I decided to remove postfix and install exim - same problem. There's an exim entry in /etc/inetd.conf, but telnet to port 25 still doesn't respond.

    Even stranger: whatever port I try to telnet to, I get the same response. For example, if I "telnet localhost 80", I get "Trying 127.0.0.1...", whereas if I "telnet zen 80" from my laptop I get a response from Apache. Looks like there's an underlying issue.


  • #3
    niallb
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 2,780 ✭✭✭niallb


    oscarBravo wrote:
    Fetchmail reports "SMTP connect to localhost failed". When I try to "telnet localhost 25", I don't get any response. And yet, I can see postfix is running, and "lsof -i" shows me "master" listening on port 25.
    What does postfix say? Take a look at your mail logs.
    Also take a look at the output of iptables-save
    if you're using linux. Might be firewall related.

    NiallB


  • #4
    oscarBravo
    Technology & Internet Moderators Posts: 28,862 Mod ✭✭✭✭oscarBravo


    Got it working again - the problem was that the loopback interface "lo" was down. Bringing it up sorted it all out.

    Now I don't understand why it was down. That's the way it was after a reboot. /etc/network/interfaces has the lines: 
    # The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
    ...which looks vanilla to me. The only reference to "lo" I can see in dmesg is "lo: Disabled Privacy Extensions".

    Strange.


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