On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 10:00:05AM +0700, Olivier Nicole wrote:
> > for reasons that are beyond me, a few hours ago i stopped being able to
> > connect with my mail server. mutt tells me "(connection refused)";
> > the other GUI mailer say zip; they simply do not connect.
> >
> > i rebooted my HUB among other things; before that, i could not get outside
> > my
> > network; nor could i even get to ethic [my Server]. since the only thing i
> > did was powercycle my linksys hub, i figure that did it.
> >
> > right now i am continuing the portupgrade on my mail/web/dns server in
> > the hopes that when that is done, mail will work again. if not, what else
> > could it be? directories/files/links i need to check/?
>
> It seems the reboot of your Linksys switch helped some how.
yes; and it seems likely that the reason ii could not get to
my email was that {for unknown reasons} my dovecot has failed
to initialize.
note that i did not configure my new setup like this. now i
have one mail server and dovecot is used to distribute mail
to my other unix servers. i barely understand sendmail; i
do NOT understand dovecot... .
>
> Before portupgrading randomly this or that application, you should try
> to understand what is going wrong.
>
> Upgrade of DNS should go easily, but when you start upgrading web or
> mail, you are talking about tens or hunderds of applications, you are
> very likely something goes wrong and you break a system that was
> working before.
it seems that mail my daughter sent me from hotmail did not
pass muster because it lacked a subject. i was advised to
portupgrade {or at least upgrade my spamblocker}. i did
this. during the upgrade of either dovecot or spamassassin i
was asked to kill one or both. i figured a reboot would
reinstantiate everything. it may have; but things were not
restarted correctly.
bind9 is current; i am extremely careful with that; i just
didn't realize that i've got to approach everything with the
same caution.
>
> When you say you could not "get" to ethic, what do you mean?
>
> - Cannot ping?
>
> - Cannot ssh?
>
> - Cannot telnet port 22, 25, 80?
>
> - Cannot traceroute (if your station and the server are on different
> LAN)?
>
> - Cannot ping another machine on your LAN?
>
> - Are you sure it was not your desktop that was faulty?
my firewall was the give-away. i run pfSense and it told me
that the host was down.
the real gotcha is that my KVM wires are not plugged in
correctly. so i could not even get to the serve until i
messed with that. when i was able to type at the console
of my server, i did a therapeutic reboot. ---altho, the was
power-cycling my switch that really did the trick.
i was about to call it a century when i tried mail. mutt
failed again; that turned out to be that dovecot had failed
to restart.
Now everything is working. but it's only temporary. back in
the mid-90s a systems admin friend said that
computers/networks/<<things>> are always breaking
down. it's the sysadmin's job to do his best to keep things
going. i get an F- for that today/tonight..... FWIW, i
don't even pretend to be a syste,s admin!
>
> - Etc.
>
> You should make a diagnostic before trying to apply any solution.
>
> As the reboot of thw switch did it, to me it looks like a network
> issue: bad switch, bad cable, some highly infected machine on your LAN
> that is stressing the swtich, rather than a server/service issue.
the power line was bent to the switch; but not that badly.
[[i'm keeping a Printed list of things-to-do-before-i-hit-PANIC.]]
appreciate your mail!
gary
>
> Good luck,
>
> Olivier
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--
Gary Kline kl...@thought.org http://www.thought.org Public Service Unix
http://jottings.thought.org http://transfinite.thought.org
The 7.79a release of Jottings: http://jottings.thought.org/index.php
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