SMTP, SUBMISSION issue

[Nick Cockinos]

This is a bit hard to explain.. but Ill give it a go...

We've been running toasters for a few years and we have a 4.06 toaster that has been our main machine and was running perfectly. The other day however, it started to play up.

SMTP connections are being rejected and when we run nmap SMTP 25 shows as filtered. I've recompiled everything from vpopmail, qmail, ucspi and daemontools without success.

We can get users to send using port 587, and thier mail sends out fine, but mail coming into the box (from the world) is being rejected or doesn't get delivered.

Any ideas, comments or questions are greatly appreciated.

Nick Cockinos

[Nick Cockinos]

It looks like we may have two tcpservers running. on as root (accepting) and one as vpopmail (paused).

Which is the right one to be running and how do I stop the other?

[Nick Cockinos]

Well....
After losing more hair (not much to go now...) and building another toaster to get things working again, the original toaster that had all the problems, miraculously started working again!!!

We've decided to leave the new one up and running (coz it's werkin' and it's the latest) and leave the old one running to enable dns to populate correctly and to make sure people get thier email off the old server.

What I'd like to know is, Does anyone have an idea why the original server might have had a brain fart? By that I mean it seems as though the problem was only temporary. Nothing had changed on the network apart from one user receiving an obscene amount of spam (100's of Mb/day), and nothing had been done to the server, hence it being an older version.

Funny thing was, when we put the domains and users onto another toaster, exactly the same problem occured. It was a later toaster (5.X) and had been running fine with only a couple of domains on it. That machine has now been fried and replaced with the latest toaster and all the original domains (over 200) and is working fine.

I guess we'd like to know why the problem occured so if it does happen again (maybe not to us) we can get it fixed.

Thanks Toasters!

P.S. Matt, you must be pretty chuffed to see how far the toaster has developed over the years. I can't think of another community as knoweageable and ready to offer help, without ridicule, when it is needed. Well Done!

[antoniop]

On the toaster below

Code Select Expand


[root@mail /]# ps ax | grep tcpserver
47544  ??  I      0:03.61 [tcpserver]
47551  ??  I      0:00.02 /usr/local/bin/tcpserver -S -H -R -c8 -t12 -x /usr/local/vpopmail/etc/tcp.smtp.cdb -u 89 -g 89 0 smtp (rbl stuff) qmail-smtpd /usr/local/vpopmail/bin/vchkpw /usr/bin/true
[root@mail /]#


You mentioned on the problematic server there was two tcpserver processes, 1x run and 1x paused.  My understanding of unix is if a process is paused, it will not respond.

Do you still have two SMTP tcpserver processes on this box?

I would have tried the following:
$ svc -d /service/smtp   (replace /service/smtp with your smtp/run file directory location)
$ ps ax | grep smtp

kill the remaining tcpserver smtp processes and restart smtp
$ svc -u /service/smtp

check if smtp is working again
$ ps ax | grep smtp
$ telnet 127.0.0.1  25

Code Select Expand


Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mail... ESMTP
quit
221 mail...
Connection closed by foreign host.
[root@mail /]#