mail problems: "stat=queued"

[Pedro Sousa]

I'm having problems when sending mails from HPUX to NT.
My HP systems are only mail clients.

This working until last friday on all HP systems, but now it doesn't work for some!

following is the message I receive in mail.log:
sendmail[24124]: NAA24124: to=, delay=00:00:01, mailer=relay, stat=queued
any ideas?
tia
Pedro

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Pedro:

Try:

# sendmail -q -v

Also, is/was your system's run average very high? sendmail will queue when the load average exceeds eight (8).

...JRF...

[Greg Royle]

Hello Pedro,
If there have not been any changes to your system it should still work. From what you describe the mailer=relay suggests that your message(s) have been passed onto another machine for processing. The information associated in the mail.log usually gives you information as to what machine the message will be relayed to eg:

mailer=relay, relay=unknown.test.any.com
hp.com [192.168.17.4]

So find out the state of the relay in our example 192.168.17.4 or unknown.test.any.com with:

telnet 192.168.17.4 25

If the result of above says something like:

Trying...
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused

Then there is no smtp agent such as sendmail running on the relay. You simply need to start it up or find out what the problem is.

James mentioned sendmail -q -v. This is a good way of reprocessing the queue of messages and telling you exactly what sendmail is doing throughout the processing.

[Pedro Sousa]

Thanks James, it helped me to relieve my email queue, but for the mails of my domain, it gave me the following error:
xxxx@infineon.com... infineon.com: Name server timeout
xxxx@infineon.com... Transient parse error -- message queued for future delivery
root... Warning: could not send message for past 4 hours
infineon.com: Name server timeout

I do not understand this. I can nslookup my email server by name and IP.

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Pedro:

Have any changes been made to your /etc/nsswitch.conf file? Check it's timestamp.

...JRF...

[Douglas Cromby_1]

Hello,

Do you use DNS or only a hosts file?
If you have a /etc/resolv.conf file, the sendmail will assume that DNS is being used and check it first regardless of the search order shown in /etc/nsswitch.conf. However, having said that the content /etc/nsswitch.conf is important, and a typo in this file can give this error.

[Pedro Sousa]

the file /etc/nsswitch.conf is not modified since 24th of March!
these are the contents of it:
hosts: files [NOTFOUND=continue UNAVAIL=continue] dns

Checked for strange caracters, and everything is OK.

so, I have the same DNS configuration over 32 systems and mail works on some of them!

I've copied the contents of the dir /etc/mail from a system were mail is working, changed the sendmail.cw and it still doesn't work!

[Pedro Sousa]

I found another thing:
it works fine if I take out the 'dns' from /etc/nsswitch.conf (http://europe-support2.external.hp.com/cki/bin/doc.pl/sid=047f0a7a0121b84c55/screen=ckiDisplayDocument?docId=200000014940994)!!

Of course I need to add the exchange server's IP to /etc/hosts.
Why?