[Preston] strange mail server problem

[Matthew T. Atkinson]

'ellow,

I'm back online now after moving house -- it's taken a while for the
ADSL to be activated.  It is really nice to be away from dial-up SSH
sessions that feel as delayed as the acting in <insert name of least
favourite low-quality soap opera here> :-).

I hope you all had a great holiday.  Good luck to those of you that may
be having exams at Uni soon!

Here is the problem I am posting about...

I have recently got Postfix set up on a Debian Woody box to act as my
mail server.  I am new to the practicalities of setting up mail servers
so a friend helped me with it.  It appears to work fine, however
something strange is happening:

Most messages come in through my server, as they should, but every so
often one doesn't get through -- instead it goes to my backup MX (the
headers show this).  After the person who helped me set it up did some
tests, he informed me that sometimes the connection is not getting made
at the TCP level (and is therefore unrelated to the mail server
software).

I have tried telnetting in from my desktop (i.e. on my LAN, under the
mail server box) and a remote machine on the Internet but I always seem
to get through fine.

I have checked inetd.conf and found that Postfix is definitely the only
thing listening on the SMTP port.  I am really stumped as to what could
be going on here.  The problem looks far more fundamental than the mail
software but I am thinking that it may be something wrong in a conf file
or similar on my part as I am sure this type of problem would never have
made it into Woody if everyone was affected.

Thanks in advance for any info you may have,

bye just now,


P.S. Sorry if I have missed any spelling mistakes -- Evolution is
refusing to check the spelling of my messages because I dist-upgraded
:-).
-- 
Matthew T. Atkinson <matthew at agrip.org.uk>