mail stopped working

[Darrell Allen]

Hi all,

I have 2 HPUX 11.0 servers on which mail has stopped working. I can read mail that was received before the onset of the problem but no new mail is being received. Mail files in /var/mail are not being written. This problem affects all users including root.

I enter a test message as follows:
# mail darrella
this is a test
.
#

No error message is returned nor written to syslog yet /var/mail/darrella does not get written.

Permissions on /var/mail are 775 with owner bin:mail.

The production server was rebooted Sunday morning. The development server was reboot Friday. Mail was working before the reboot on the production server. I don't know about the development server.

We don't use inter-system mail. Basically the only mail sent on these servers is system generated (print job canceled, some output from cron jobs, etc...) and is only sent to users on the same server.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Darrell

[Darrell Allen]

I should have stated the reason for the reboots was LVM maintenance. I moved some user home directory filesystems to another VG and deleted the "freed" VGs. There were no patches nor software installs. Nothing should have affected vg00 in any way other than the updates for lvm.

Darrell

[harry d brown jr]

Darrell,

That'll teach you to reboot your servers!!!! Just kidding. Anyways, is sendmail running? Are the permissions and ownership of /var/mail like this:
drwxrwxr-x 2 bin mail 96 Jan 29 09:04 mail

Is mail like this:
# ls -l /usr/bin/mail
-r-sr-sr-x 2 root mail 45056 Nov 14 2000 /usr/bin/mail
#

Check the sendmail configuration file, make sure nothing changed:
# ls -l /etc/mail/send*
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 94277 Nov 14 2000 /etc/mail/sendmail.cf
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 701 Aug 13 15:20 /etc/mail/sendmail.cw
-rw-r--r-- 1 root mail 34 Dec 13 10:21 /etc/mail/sendmail.pid
#

live free or die
harry

[harry d brown jr]

Maybe /etc/passwd is corrupt (you changed their home directories)?

live free or die
harry

[oiram]

Hi,

The first step is checking that sendmail is running and listening. You can do this with
ps -ef|grep sendmail
Sendmail listen in port 25. If you make
netstat -an
do you see the port 25 listening?
You can run lsof to verify that sendmail is listening in that port
lsof|grep sendmail
After verifying this what happens if you make
telnet localhost 25
Does the port accept the connection?

Best regards.

[Darrell Allen]

Reboots? We don't need no stinking reboots!

Well, maybe sometimes.

Perms seem okay. Nothing seems to have changed here:
-r-sr-sr-x 2 root mail 45056 Nov 7 1997 /usr/bin/mail
drwxrwxr-x 2 bin mail 1024 Jan 29 08:05 /var/mail
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 77759 Oct 27 1997 /etc/mail/sendmail.cf
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 759 Jan 10 2000 /etc/mail/sendmail.cw
-rw-r--r-- 1 root mail 35 Jan 28 19:19 /etc/mail/sendmail.pid

sendmail is running. I've stopped and restarted it as well.

Everyone is logging in okay. The home directory change didn't change paths. I simply moved the lvs to a different vg.

Actually, on the development server, I vgexported 2 test vgs, used SDR to remove the EMC luns from that box, then rebooted to verify all was well.

Darrell

[Darrell Allen]

Yes, sendmail is running and accepts connections on port 25 (verified with telnet).

Darrell

[Joseph C. Denman]

Darrell,

Have you checked your mail.log and syslog to see if anything strange is going on?

...jcd...

[Uday_S_Ankolekar]

Hi,
Strange..! I would like to know what is there on /var/adm/syslog/mail.log file once you send test mail.

-USA..

[Darrell Allen]

Messages from /var/adm/syslog/mail.log generated by test message:

Jan 29 09:45:00 fasqad sendmail[11141]: NOQUEUE: SYSERR(darrella): NIS map mail.aliases specified, but NIS not running
Jan 29 09:45:00 fasqad sendmail[11141]: JAA11141: from=darrella, size=9, class=0, pri=30009, nrcpts=1, msgid=<200201291445.JAA11141@fasqad.>, relay=darrella@localhost
Jan 29 09:45:00 fasqad sendmail[11141]: JAA11141: to=root, delay=00:00:00, mailer=local, stat=queued

Darrell