dovecot Outlook failure

[Karl Pearson]

On Thu, 23 Oct 2008, Rick Stevens wrote:

> Karl Pearson wrote:
>> I'm in a client office, and they use Outlook. I installed a new server
>> after theirs was hacked into from China (story for another time). I've
>> installed Fedora 8 and everything is working, except dovecot from inside
>> the network (it's not going to work from outside anymore :) ).
>> 
>> If I sit at an XP PC and telnet 10.0.0.240 110 it just hangs for awhile,
>> then times out and ends up back at a DOS prompt. Same for 143 (IMAP).
>> 
>> I can telnet 10.0.0.240 25 and send email all day long.
>> 
>> I setup an Evolution account for both POP3 and IMAP on the server and it
>> works fine.
>> 
>> I have configured 2 other PCs with Fedora 8 in the last 2 months and
>> they both work fine. What am I missing here?
>
> Uh, really dumb question, but did you "chkconfig dovecot on" to make
> sure it starts on boot?  Did you start it via "service dovecot start"?
> Does "netstat -lpn" show dovecot listening on ports 110 and 143?

No, that's not the least bit dumb. I didn't and it wasn't, but that wasn't 
the problem because I did that pretty early on, and fixed it. The server 
had been rebooted a few times since.

I did find the problem, though hadn't come across it before. It was 
iptables not 'trusting' those services to be accessed from a remote IP 
address. Thus, it worked on the server, but not from anywhere else. I did 
iptables -F and turned it off. The server is behind a very nice 
Linux-based firewall, and those services aren't NATted anyway. Only 25, 80 
and 22 are open, and 22 to root is forbidden. The old server had been on a 
DMZ, with Samba and everything else open for the world to see.

When I install other servers, I typically disable iptables from starting 
at boot because I have my own scripts to do it for me.

With the information you gave in the last thread I started, I may be 
re-thinking that strategy. It bit me big this time.

Thanks,

Karl

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