SMTP not working...

T

thetechnaddict

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Sep 2, 2009
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smtp does not seem to work.

the message from squirrel mail is:

Service not available, closing channel
421 server.ablazepartners.org Unexpected log failure, please try later - closing connection.

Though it does send the mail sometime later.

I have run through all the steps in http://help.directadmin.com/item.php?id=16

I've not been able to check step 7 File permissions for virtual pop inboxes should be... as I can't find the listed directories - but pop seems to be working.

I have asked the provider or the virtuozzo vps to set up reverse dns (or is there any way of doing that myself?

I've set up a googleapps account just in case but would rather not use them if I could get the mail server running correctly.

This is for hostname server.ablazepartners.org

I have been running around this for days now, can anyone point out the next steps towards resolving this please?
 
Does this point the way?krk

I found this thread..

http://www.directadmin.com/forum/showthread.php?p=164565#post164565

I checked the ownership on

/var/spool/exim/input
/var/spool/exim/db
/var/spool/exim/msglog

(all mail:mail as they should be)

and also looked at logs - mainlog was empty, but mainlog.1

contained repeated entries like this:

2009-09-08 14:24:01 1Ml0fx-0008S0-29 <= [email protected] U=root P=local S=832 T="Cron <root@server> /usr/local/directadmin/dataskq" from <[email protected]> for root
2009-09-08 14:24:01 1Ml0fx-0008S0-29 User 0 set for local_delivery transport is on the never_users list

From the post whose link is given above I can see that a solution for this is to create a .forward file in the root directory that presumably forwards mail to an actual readable email address such as [email protected]

Does anyone know how I can do that? I do know how to create a file called .forward in / but what do I put in it?

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/local/sys/mail.old/filter.exmp.html has some examples, but I can't work out the simplest possible entry... "if user is root forward to admin"

Help much appreciated.
 
port 25 not listening?

I am unable to telnet localhost 25 (connection refused)

netstat -tna

does not reveal anything listening on port 25..

Does this mean there's no smtp server?

Restarting exim seems to work although...

#service exim restart
Shutting down exim: /etc/init.d/exim: line 40: kill: (3366) - No such process

Starting exim:
#
 
I've posted elsewhere today how and where to create a .forward file. It goes into /root, not into the / directory.

Exim isn't running; if it were then it wouldn't say No such process when trying to stop it as part of the restart command.

No, I have no idea why it's not running. You should check your exim logs.

Jeff
 
Exim now starting

It seems that it has been an ownership issue on the log files -

# chown - R mail /var/log/exim
# chgrp -R mail /var/log/exim

Exim now starts (and restarts from cmd and from DA cp)

I can also telnet localhost 25
 
Spoke too soon

Exim stopped again - all ownerships to /var/log/exim have reverted.

Attempts to change them prove temporary at best!

Something is changing the ownership back to nobody:root almost as fast as I can type ls -l

Can anyone suggest a) what is making the change and how to stop it; b) how to find out what is making the change
 
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Exim needs to read/write logs

I need to change ownership in order to send mail from the server.

Exim server goes down and fails to restart unless it can read and write logs.

It needs the mail user to have ownership of /var/log/exim/*

so I change ownership:

#chown -R mail:mail /var/log/exim

and the server starts and does what it should.

Then something changes the ownership of the logfiles back to nobody:root and the server stops over and refuses to start.

What does this?
How do I find out what is doing this?
 
I've solved one problem, but mail server will not start.

Working on the idea that there must be something else installed since DA that has a vested interest in log files.

I have a stack installation of KnowledgeTree that I know also writes logs to /var/log

I stopped the kt services and changed ownership of the exim log files - true enough they were no longer being changed back.

I changed config files for kt, started it all up again - and hey presto the ownership of /var/log/exim remains as I set it - mail:mail

But exim will not start :confused:

Logs are empty
 
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Having had Exim running, though only briefly I feel more determined than ever to get it working.

I don't have a clue what to try next.

What about a re-install!

What does anyone else think? Should I? Is there a simple(r) or recommended method?

Well... followed a post from John at DirectAdmin Support:

rpm -e --nodeps da_exim
cd /usr/local/directadmin/scripts
./exim.sh

And it seems no worse...

But it still won't start!

So much for panic Microsoft solutions!
 
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All our DirectAdmin servers have both the /var/log/exim directly and all files inside it owned by mail:mail.

So the question is what have you done that's causing them to change? Find it, and remove whatever you did :).

Jeff
 
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