Stopping onslaught of NOQUEUE messages

[Ed Hon]

I tried configuring sendmail.cf but evidently didn't do it right. Anyway, I'm being flooded by NOQUEUE messages in syslog:

Feb 5 09:32:36 hpsym sendmail[523]: NOQUEUE: Null connection from [10.64.116.10
0]

I just want them stopped. How do I clear out whatever is causing it?

[Ed Hon]

More info:

# mailq -v
Mail Queue (1 request)
--Q-ID-- --Size-- -Priority- ---Q-Time--- -----------Sender/Recipient-----------
PAA09845 5 3360147+Feb 4 15:50 root
(Deferred: Connection refused by abc.xyz.com.)

I think all I need to do is remove this request from the queue. How do I do that?

[Uday_S_Ankolekar]

Hi,

Try nslookup with the ip address shown in the syslog file.

This error is due to lack of standards SMTP commands from the client like, MAIL, EXPN,VRFY

Also try to do telnet 25
and see if it gives you Null connection error

-USA..

[Ed Hon]

# nslookup 10.64.116.10
Using /etc/hosts on: hpsym

looking up FILES
Name: 3comswt
Address: 10.64.116.10

It is our network switch.

# telnet 10.64.116.10 25
Trying...
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused

[Ron Kinner]

See attached for ways to stop sendmail. Then search aliases and sendmail.cf for files and/or the ip address of your switch. If you don't see anything then log onto your switch and see if it is set up to send error messages by email and if the address it sends to is incorrect. Is your switch really called FILES? Maybe you have a bad entry in /etc/hosts or in your DNS?

Ron

[Mark Greene_1]

you don't have a mail service running on that server for the ip given. Do an nslookup for your domain to find which server holds the mx record:

# nslookup

> set type=mx

> [enter your domain]

you will get output similar to this:

xxx.com
origin = xyz.xxx.com
mail addr = root.xyz.xxx.com
serial = 10001
refresh = 10800 (3 hours)
retry = 3600 (1 hour)
expire = 3600000 (41 days 16 hours)
minimum ttl = 2592000 (30 days)

> exit (to exit nslookup)

you can then look in the sendmail.cf file for the DS entry, and change it to the xyz.xxx.com server from above and retest you mail process.

HTH
mark

[Ed Hon]

Ron, FILES from nslookup means the domain name is being resolved from /etc/hosts (versus DNS, etc). Mark, the info you gave will be helpful for resolving my mail routing problem. Right now I want to "cancel" whatever is causing all the NOQUEUE messages. I did

# ll /var/spool/mqueue
total 4
-rw------- 1 root mail 8 Jan 31 16:45 dfQAA05127
-rw------- 1 root mail 583 Feb 5 10:24 qfQAA05127

Can I just rm these entries?

[Mark Greene_1]

yes, but kill the sendmail process first so it does not generate more errors when you do the removes.

--
mark

[Ed Hon]

I logged a call to HP support. The response was that it was not anything from my machine doing it. One possiblity is network monitoring software, running on another machine and doing probes on the network. I will check that out with our network admin. Thanks for all the assistance.