pop before smtp stopped working suddenly

[pphillips]

Pop before SMTP stopped working last night and we made no changes, my guess is maybe a cpanel update caused it.

If I add our IP to /etc/relayhosts I am able to send. /etc/relayhosts is rw-r-r root:root. I tried restarting antirelayd and all it does is clear out my IP, it still doesn't add the IP when I try to receive.

What could prevent the server from adding the IP of a user to relayhosts? If the server would add the IP's of POP users, it would work ok.

Thanks for your help!

Paul

[nxds]

antirelayd reads /var/log/maillog and adds IP addresses to /etc/relayhosts. I've seen pop before smtp break because of log rotation problems in CentOS.

The easiest way to check for this is to look at the timestamps in /var/log using ls -ltr. If maillog.1 is newer than maillog then you have the log rotation bug where syslogd hasn't re-opened the log files after renaming them. The effect is that new pop connections are writting into maillog.1 but antirelayd is still reading from maillog.

pkill -HUP syslogd should force syslogd to close and re-open the log files, but search the forums for a more permanent fix.

[pphillips]

Wow, you are a genius, that is exactly what happened.

I found the following fix, but want to confirm if its correct:

vi /etc/cron.daily/logrotate
add
export TMPDIR=/var/tmp

My logrotate file currently contains:

#!/bin/sh

/usr/sbin/logrotate /etc/logrotate.conf
EXITVALUE=$?
if [ $EXITVALUE != 0 ]; then
/usr/bin/logger -t logrotate "ALERT exited abnormally with [$EXITVALUE]"
fi
exit 0

Where in logrotate would I put "export TMPDIR=/var/tmp", the end after exit 0? and will this even permanently fix the issue?

Thanks!

[chirpy]

You put it in after the first line. Yes, it's a permanent fix.

[pphillips]

My /etc/cron.daily/logrotate file looks like this, and the system reverted back to writing to maillog.1 instead of maillog:

#!/bin/sh
export TMPDIR=/var/tmp
/usr/sbin/logrotate /etc/logrotate.conf
EXITVALUE=$?
if [ $EXITVALUE != 0 ]; then
/usr/bin/logger -t logrotate "ALERT exited abnormally with [$EXITVALUE]"
fi
exit 0


Does this look correct? Is there any other reason the system would revert back to writing to maillog.1 instead of maillog?

[nxds]

If /var/tmp is a symlink to /tmp I don't see how adding export TMPDIR=/var/tmp would make any difference.

My understanding is that the problem occurs when the tmp dir is mounted noexec so the replacement TMPDIR must point to a directory in an non-noexec mounted filesystem.

I fixed the problem on my systems in an entirely different way: I added a call to pkill -HUP syslogd in the line after the logger command. It may not be the best fix but I haven't had any problems in months.