Posts Tagged ‘postfix’

Jun
29
2010

Postfix SMTP relay broken, MX host not found.

Yesterday, all outgoing emails started to accumulate in the Postfix queue with this error:

Jun 29 13:35:02 intranet postfix/smtp[15330]: 88AE28C839: to=, relay=none, delay=8921, delays=8897/4/20/0, dsn=4.4.3, status=deferred (Host or domain name not found. Name service error for name=myprovider.isp.hosting type=MX: Host not found, try again)

First thing I did, nslookup and dig tests, yep the host can be found, although there is no MX record. Could it be that Postfix absolutely requires the MX record?

As it turns out: no. What actually happened is that I changed DNS settings for this server. I went into /etc/resolv.conf and updated the settings, as a new DNS server was installed and replaced and agin one.

What I didn’t know is that Postfix keeps a cached copy of this resolv.conf in a mini-chroot jail located in /var/spool/postfix/etc/resolv.conf

That file had the old DNS server settings! I changed it for the correct servers, and issued

postfix reload
postqueue -p

Voilà!

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Posted in Fix | 2 Comments »

Mar
13
2009

Weird amavisd-new / perl crash

I just built a new server on Debian 5, using the latest of everything.

After building my amavids-new + spamassassin + clamav + postfix + bayesian learning system, it started to crash with this error:

in amavis log:

amavisd-new Net::Server: Couldn’t fork: [Cannot allocate memory]

in mail.log:

Mar 12 05:15:16 fry amavis[29358]: (29358-08) (!!)TROUBLE in check_mail: parts_decode_ext FAILED: file(1) utility (/usr/bin/file) error: run_command (open pipe): Can’t fork at /usr/lib/perl/5.10/IO/File.pm line 66, <GEN77> line 89. at /usr/sbin/amavisd-new line 2892, <GEN77> line 89.
Mar 12 05:15:16 fry amavis[29358]: (29358-08) (!)PRESERVING EVIDENCE in /var/lib/amavis/tmp/amavis-20090312T051516-29358

Well, after 2 days of googling’ about this problem, i finally found a thread where someone realized he forgot to activate swap on the server, and therefore, fork was failing.

Would I be that kind of admin, that rebuilds a whole server and forgets to mount swap? Yes! That’s me! Thanks Richard!

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Posted in Fix | No Comments »