Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Hosting Security and Technology : Qmail hangs on external connections

[Pingu]

I'm installing a new server (CentOS4), and most of it is done. I was under the impression that even Qmail works as expected, until I noticed I wasn't getting any email from outside the server. Locally it works fine. Email from one local user to another works fine. I've done testing with Telnet sessions to port 25. Locally, again, it responds all happy and everything is just fine.
But when I start a telnet session to port 25 from my home pc, it makes a connection, and then just "hangs", nothing happens...

I've tried with my firewall down, but that's not the problem. I've checked file permissions/ownership as much as I could, but that's not clear as Qmail uses half a dozen accounts

Two questions here:
Anyone have a clue why external connections to port 25 end up hanging in nothingness?

Where oh where can I find info about file permissions and ownerships and such for Qmail related stuff?

[jesta]

Is it possilbe that there is a firewall in between your server and the rest of the world. Having the connection hang rather than drop sounds very much like someone along the line is droping your connection attempt, rather than the server denying it. Even having bogus settings passed to tcpserver (which is assume you have running qmail-smtpd) it won't just hang it will drop your connection.

On the other hand I might be completely wrong.

Pete

[Arny]

I know that this may not sound very helpful, but why not remove the Qmail and install Exim ?
Qmail is good but hard to configure, and one day you will have to set up some kind of spam filters, which will take time with Qmail,
Exim seems much easier to configure and run.

[Pingu]

A firewall was my thought as there are no problems locally, just externally. Weird though, because port 25 is open of course. Plus my home ip has special privileges. Still, you never know, so I've tried without the firewall and unfortunately the result is exactly the same.

I've also no problems with sending email to external addresses. The emails I've send were send from webmail, so I guess from local to external. I wonder if I can connect a mailclient from the outside...

With reagrds to Arny, not helpful is any reply not given. A reply seriously suggesting an alternative is as good as any answer and I will look into Exim. I'm rather attached to Qmail though. Last time I installed it (with virusscanning and SpamAssassin integrated) was a while ago, and I also ran into some issues. But the benefit of Qmail is that the version I installed back then has done an excellent job for two years, practically without manual interference. Can Exim, or any other mailsolution, beat that?

Anyway, about the problem I'm facing now, can selinux have something to do with it? selinux is running, and no, I have no experience whatsoever with it.

[Arny]

Pingu, I`m agree with you. Qmail rocks, but the problems that I have met (and my colleagues as well) with it were more than the benefits.
I don`t know if Exim can beat that If you are happy with Qmail, than don`t change it. I`m not from the kind of ppl who would say
that something is good simply because I did not have any problems with. Everything is good as long as it does the job

Ask your ISP if they can connect. This can be because a router in-between cuts that port. If you have a hosting account anywhere(not on that server) with SSH access, try to connect from there to your server and see what will happen.

[choon]

Pingu, try to setup/configure another smtpd listening on port 26 and see whether you are able to relay mails through it?

[Pingu]

Thanks for the replies, guys. I've got it working now, after spending a couple of hours doing a (re)reinstall. The reinstall messed things up even more though, so I had even more to fix.

For those interested, I had to fix a couple of things:
Permissions and ownership needed to be corrected on several files and directories. Especially since for the reinstall new accounts were used, and those accounts weren't compiled in. After recompiling and reinstalling with the right accounts I still had permission issues that needed to be fixed.

But the biggest issue was with my /var/qmail/supervise/qmail-smtpd/run file. It's hard to say what was wrong exactly, but somehow the whole thing got stuck when bumping in a no permission to run or not existing /usr/local/bin/rblsmtpd. "ps -ef" showed "readproctitle service errors: ...38463?rblsmtpd: fatal: unable to run : file does n" Try and guess the full line here...
Anyway, that's pretty weird because /usr/local/bin/rblsmtpd exists and permissions are correct. Perhaps some hidden characters/spaces were in odd places in the run file? It was a copy/paste job from the previous server.
I corrected the error by trying a minimal run file and built up gradually. I've got the full deal running now, basically the same as the one that crashed on rblsmtpd. With rblsmtpd of course...

All is well now? Umm, next I need to figure out how to fix "warning: unable to stat mess"
Qmail stat seems to think there are hundreds of messages in the queues, but there's nothing there.

But for today (and probably the whole weekend) I'm kinda fed up with the darn thing...