fetchmail vs sendmail vs /etc/hosts
Arthur Dickinson
adickinson at cfl.rr.com
Sat Jan 13 13:41:04 UTC 2007
On Fri, 2007-01-12 at 23:28 -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> Context: I installed FC6 on my daughter's notebook during the
> Christmas break. Some time later, fetchmail stopped working.
>
> It turned out that fetchmail tries to inject local mail by using SMTP
> with localhost port 25 (reasonable).
>
> Sendmail IS listening to 127.0.0.1 port 25.
>
> /etc/hosts says localhost is ::1. This is the IPv6 version of
> localhost.
>
> So fetchmail is trying to contact ::1 port 25 but nobody is listening.
>
> Which part of this is wrong? How come fetchmail worked for a while
> after FC6 was installed?
>
> I fixed the fetchmail problem by changing the definition of localhost
> from ::1 to 127.0.0.1.
>
> In /etc/mail/submit.mc, the config file for the sendmail submission
> daemon, there is a pair of lines:
> dnl If you use IPv6 only, change [127.0.0.1] to [IPv6:::1]
> FEATURE(`msp', `[127.0.0.1]')dnl
> That looks as if you must chose between IPv4 and IPv6. That seems
> dumb.
>
> On my FC6 system (which does not handle mail), there are two lines
> defining localhost -- one with ::1 and the other with 127.0.0.1.
> On my daughter's system (now) only the ::1 line appears. Why? Maybe
> because she used the network gui to disable eth1 (for some reason her
> notebook started leaching connectivity from neighbour's WiFi instead
> of using her perfectly good wired connection).
>
> This seems like a bug, but I don't know which component is wrong:
> sendmail (for not listening to ::1).
> whatever whacked /etc/hosts (for losing 127.0.0.1 as localhost).
> I think that fetchmail is blameless. Except that the error message
> wasn't too clear.
>
The culprit may be system-config-network. See Bugzilla (214932).
Putting the ipv4 entry ahead of the ipv6 entry may keep
system-config-network from doing this again if you use it again.
--
Arthur Dickinson <adickinson at cfl.rr.com>
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