qmail+fetchmail array communication

Hi,

I have a setup on my server that uses fetchmail to get the mails from my freemail account. Fetchmail forwards them to my local qmail, which delivers locally and stores in my mailbox (Maildir format). Dovecot provides IMAP access to the mailbox.

The array worked perfectly when I went on my holiday (27th). Yesterday evening, though, when I come back, the last mail I get is from 8PM. Everything after that isn't fetched anymore. The log files of fetchmail say this:

Quote:

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fetchmail: 15 messages for [email protected] at pop.gmx.net (466045 octets).
fetchmail: reading message [email protected]@pop.gmx.net:1 of 15 (3911 octets) ..fetchmail: SMTP connect to localhost failed
fetchmail: SMTP transaction error while fetching from pop.gmx.net
fetchmail: Query status=10 (SMTP)

---

The log file of qmail-smtpd contains this:

Quote:

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@4000000041d9855e286db17c tcpserver: status: 1/40
@4000000041d9855e286dc8ec tcpserver: pid 2624 from 127.0.0.1
@4000000041d9858c1ec4e26c tcpserver: ok 2624 :127.0.0.1:25 :127.0.0.1::37987
@4000000041d9858c1ec71104 tcpserver: end 2624 status 256
@4000000041d9858c1ec714ec tcpserver: status: 0/40

---

My firewall (shorewall) is running. It generally allows all connection from the server and the internal network to the outside, with the exception of this rule:

Code:

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DROP    loc:192.168.1.5 net            tcp    25

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192.168.1.5 is my work computer, not the one where fetchmail and qmail run on (that's 192.168.1.1).

Configurations are fairly standard. fetchmail uses the user "wasti" as postmaster, which provided reliable delivery in the past.
tcp.smtpd contains very few active lines:
127.0.0.1:allow,RELAYCLIENT="",RBLSMTPD=""
:allow
192.168.1.1:allow,RELAYCLIENT="",RBLSMTPD=""
62.178.0.135:allow,RELAYCLIENT="",RBLSMTPD=""

The last two IPs are the internal and external IPs of the server, respectively.

rcpthosts has all local names of my server listed.

Does anyone have suggestions what to do? I want this working again.

Can you check the conversation between fetchmail and qmail? You could use tcpdump or ethereal to see what the conversation in 127.0.0.1 is. It looks like qmail isn't running. That's what fetchmail says when I haven't my mail server running.

Ok, I looked into it (telnet to SMTP server).

When I attempt a connection to localhost:25, tcpserver immediately answers and the connection is established. However, it seems that it takes tcpserver a minute or more to spawn a qmail-smtpd process. (If I wait that long, I finally get an ESMTP message.) Apparently, fetchmail times out before that and thinks that no server is running.

Any ideas why qmail-smtpd takes so long?

No idea on that. I don't use it. Have you tried rebooting the machine? Maybe it's swapping out a lot (if updatedb has run while you were away, this could happen if you don't have a lot of RAM), although if this were the case, you would have probably alrady noticed.
I can't think of any other case where an app would take so much time to react.

rebooted, didn't help. This ain't Windows, anyway ;)

No, the PC only ran for a few days anyway (my father accidently unplugged it while I was away), and it has been running for months at a time without ever exhibiting this weird behaviour.

Everything else (webserver, ...) runs fine.

>>rebooted, didn't help. This ain't Windows, anyway ;)
I know, but it was worth a try. :D

I don't know what could cause just qmail to react so slow. Is there a way to increase the timeout in fetchmail? (I don't have access to it right now, besides, mine falls back to procmail) Just as a temporary measure 'till you manage to solve it.