Problem With Sendmail

[Andrew Kaplan]

Hi there --

The sendmail daemon appears to be running on our server, but no messages are being delivered to the users. I rebooted the server and encountered the following error on system boot:

/sbin/rc2.d/S535MailScanner[start|stop] FAILED

After that message, the following message appeared:

current audit file size is 8143 kilobytes. an attempt to switch to the backup file failed. must specify a backup file now.

How do I fix this? Thanks.

[Ivan Ferreira]

What is the output of:

/sbin/init.d/MailScanner status
/sbin/init.d/sendmail status

What is logget to /var/log/maillog?

[Andrew Kaplan]

The two /sbin/init.d scripts have only the start or stop options available.

The /var/adm/syslog/mail.log file shows entries as recent as two minutes ago.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

You need to look at the details in the mail.log file and see what they mean.

You've posted to Linux, but sendmail is sendmail.

Mailscanner is most likely a program that takes over listening on port 25(smtp mail) and then passes the mail to sendmail for delivery after handling virus or spam.

We use a similar setup with trend micro.

The problem is if the Mailscanner is not set up right the mail does not get passed to sendmail.

Also, sendmail may be trying to pass the mail to a server that doesn't allow relay. Sendmail needs DNS resolution to deliver mail to the public internet.

So, at the very least, we need to see a sample from your log to further assist you.

To get you more eyeballs on this thread, I'm going to ask HP to move it to HP-UX which the name and location of your log file seem to indicate.

Please state the version, of both the OS and sendmail and what kind of server we're talking about.

There are so many possible causes, I could write a book and I'd rather make specific recommendations.

SEP