postfix vs. sendmail

[cdevers at pobox.com (Chris Devers)]

On Wed, 29 Oct 2003, Glenn Burkhardt wrote:

> This note is mostly just to offer encouragement

Thanks :)

My current thinking is a suspicion that Apple shipped this hoping that
either no one would use it, or anyone crazy enough to use it would know
exactly what they were doing. Unfortunately I'm somewhere in between :)

The problems noted earlier have been superceded -- check this out:

  $ postfix -v check 
  postfix: name_mask: host
  postfix: mynetworks: 127.0.0.1/32 
  $
  $ ps ax | grep 'p[o]st'
  9707 ?? Ss 0:00.35 /usr/libexec/postfix/master
  $
  $ telnet localhost 25
  Trying ::1...
  telnet: connect to address ::1: Connection refused
  Trying 127.0.0.1...
  telnet: connect to address 127.0.0.1: Connection refused
  telnet: Unable to connect to remote host
  $
  $ ls -l `which portscan`
  lrwxr-xr-x 1 cdevers wheel 69 May 14 22:27 /usr/local/bin/portscan ->
  /Applications/Utilities/Network Utility.app/Contents/Resources/stroke
  $ portscan localhost 24 26
  Port Scanning host: 127.0.0.1

  $
 

So... Postfix seems to be happy with the config file, and is nominally up
& running, but it's not possible to open up a connection on port 25, and
snort thinks that that port is closed. 

One of my first thoughts was that this may have something to do with the
firewall, but it turns out that this the status whether or not the built
in firewall is running. 

Plus, nothing gets logged to /var/log/mail.log. 

Any suggestions how to diagnose something like this? 


Output from `postconf` or `postconf -n` available on request. 


Anyway...

> My main.cf file also has this entry:
> 
> alias_database = hash:/etc/postfix/aliases

Yeah, this is the setting I'm using at the moment. It should also be able
to append "netinfo:/aliases" to that on an OSX machine, but threads on the
Postfix list suggest that that may be buggy, so I've got it commented out
for now. 

> but my reading of the comment indicates that it might not be necessary.  It 
> looks like you can use the 'postalias' command to query the alias database, 
> to see if it's set up correctly.  I tried this, but it seems that the alias 
> db needs to be in the current working directory, e.g.,
> 
> [root at priam glenn]# cd /etc/postfix
> [root at priam postfix]# postalias -q all aliases
> bob, ellen, jim, mike, laura, pbm, glenn, woody, cuong, jason, moe

No-op:

  $ postalias -q all /etc/postfix/aliases
  $
  $ postalias -v -q all /etc/postfix/aliases
  postalias: name_mask: host
  postalias: mynetworks: 127.0.0.1/32 
  postalias: dict_open: hash:/etc/postfix/aliases
  $

:-/
 
> Also, my procmail invocation is:
> 
> mailbox_command = /usr/bin/procmail -Y -a $DOMAIN

Procmail has been pushed down the stack now :)

If it's still acting up after I fix the other stuff, I'll try this --
thanks for the suggestion.


So -- anyone know how one might diagnose an apparently deaf SMTP daemon?



-- 
Chris Devers
is  grateful
for any help