[SWLUG] Postfix woes: Mail Transport Unavailable

[Emyr Derfel]

Hi

The old mail system was rebooting about 4 times per hour on average,
and if any POP3 sessions which were open at the time, the messages not
yet purged would be repeated in the next POP3 session, which resulted
in angry staff... I shut the old one down to try and prevent further
hardware damage when the new one seemed to be working consistently for
a few hours (I was able to send from inside to my gmail account).

I can send using
telnet smtp.btconnect.com 25
which combined with postcat gets me out of a slight hole except for
queued messages with attachments.

I've read up on this log line:
postfix/qmgr[3465]: warning: connect to transport private/smtp:
Connection refused

What I've learned is that this is a problem internal to my server. The
confusing part is that qmgr and smtpd are both components of Postfix,
so they shouldn't be startable in the wrong order.

We've started examining a diff of our /etc/postfix/main.cf and the
shipped main.cf.orig, unfortunately there is no equivalent version for
master.cf where the services are defined.

Emyr

On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 6:48 PM, Huw Lynes <lynesh at cardiff.ac.uk> wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-06-04 at 17:58 +0100, Huw Lynes wrote:
>> On Fri, 2010-06-04 at 17:17 +0100, Emyr Derfel wrote:
>> > Hi all
>> >
>> > This problem concerns the following software, freshly installed on new
>> > hardware to replace an unstable WinXP/Vpop3_ISP aliasing solution:
>> > Arch Linux, Postfix, Courier-imap, and eventually spamassassin when it
>> > works enough to consider poking at again.
>>
>> > So far I have 37 messages in the deferred queue, which is only twice
>> > the number of angry people I'll have when the boss comes back on
>> > Monday.
>>
>> Hi Emyr,
>>
>> Sorry, I can't help you on the postfix problem since it's been a long
>> time since I had to set up mail and it was Exim when I did it. Although
>> I will mention that if you are on a consumer internet connection it's
>> entirely possible that outbound SMTP is blocked by the ISP. That would
>> explain the connection refused message.
>>
> Or your own edge router/firewall might be blocking SMTP from everything
> except your old mail server.
>
> You can rule this out by telnet'ing to port 25 on an external mail
> server to see if you get a connection.
>
> Cheers,
> Huw
>
> --
> Huw Lynes                       | Advanced Research Computing
> HEC Sysadmin                    | Cardiff University
>                                | Redwood Building,
> Tel: +44 (0) 29208 70626        | King Edward VII Avenue, CF10 3NB
>
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