Topic: Urgent Help Required Please!

[Cyrus Bharda]

Hello, I have a very big problem, I have a SME 5.5 U2 setup as a Firewall/Gateway and email server and was working perfectly for the last 3 months up until a couple of hours ago when we stopped receiving external emails. This was very weird because any emails sent from external addresses to our email server have not bounced, yet? So I did a tail -f /var/log/qmail/current  and noticed that it was sending fine, apart from a couple of these errors:

alert: oh no! lost spawn connection! dying...
status: exiting

So I tryed reconnecting to the internet as we use a dialup modem for the connection, to which came another problem, it was dialing up and connecting but we could not get out. Upon further inspection of /var/log/diald/accounting.log showed this:

Calling site xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
Connecting to site xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

THEN this:

Calling site 0.0.0.0
Connecting to site 0.0.0.0

So I did a full shutdown and rebooted it and it started fine and dialed up, with the same responce in the accounting.log file but this time we can surf the web and send/receive internal emails fine, BUT STILL can only SEND to external and not RECEIVE from external addresses.

This is a production server and we are up the crappa without a paddlepop stick!

Nothing has been added/changed in the last 48 hours, and it was working fine 18 hours ago so I am now totally puzzelled on what's going on!! PLEASE HELP!!

Cyrus Bharda

[Cyrus Bharda]

Just did a MX test at http://www.zmailer.org/mxverify.html and got the following responce:

MX-VERIFY-CGI run for mydomain.com''


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Doing resolver lookup for T=MX domain=mydomain.com''

DNS yields following MX entries
  mydomain.com (86400s) IN MX  10 mail.mydomain.com
  mydomain.com (86400s) IN MX  20 smtp.mysecondarymailserver.com
  mydomain.com (86400s) IN MX  30 smtp.myteritarymailserver.com




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Testing MX server: mail.mydomain.com
Address lookup did yield following ones:


  IPv4 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx


Testing server at address: IPv4 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

ERROR: Connect failure reason: Connection refused

(Still possibly all OK!)

OK so why is my SME server refusing incoming mail???

A BIG THANKS in ADVANCE for those who can help me!

Cyrus Bharda

[Cyrus Bharda]

OK well after running around like a headless chook I sat down and did a bit of detective work, and found out that qmail was not running, even after a reboot, so I started it with:

/etc/rc.d/init.d/qmail start

But still didnt fit the original problem, so I found that under /services there is a smtpfront-qmail and that wasnt running either, so I started it using:

/etc/rc.d/init.d/smtpfront-qmail start

And then everything was fine, and just to see whether is was starting upon reboot, I rebooted and both services started fine, still no clue on why they stopped though, seems they just stopped for no reason, oh well tradgedy averted .

Just wondering what you might think of this:

/etc/rc.d/init.d/smtpfront-qmail status
/service/smtpfront-qmail: up (pid 1179) 892 seconds, normally down

My concern is the "normally down" bit?

Cyrus Bharda

[Welsh]

Cool!
You better upgrade the mailfront to 0.81. from http://untroubled.org/mailfront/
It fix some known bug of 'qmailqueue'.
Thanks for share your experience.