no mail from / for root

[j_70 at comcast.net]

Thanks for your help with this, I am learning quite a bit as we go.

ps -aeef | grep mail and 
ps -aeef | grep master 

return nothing. Also, /var/log/maillog.1 has entries similar to what is below. Do I need to just open port 25 or enable the mail service, or both?? TIA.

Feb 12 04:02:01 RHESSV2 sendmail[31843]: g1C951vrB031843: to=root, ctladdr=root (0/0), delay=00:00:00, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=relay, pri=34082, relay=[127.0.0.1] [127.0.0.1], dsn=4.0.0, stat=Deferred: Connection refused by [127.0.0.1]
 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: Steve Phillips <steve at focb.co.nz>
> j_70 at comcast.net wrote:
> > I guess the curiosity here is that:
> > 
> > [root at rhel1 root]$ ps -aeef | grep mail
> > root   19005 18945  0 20:23 pts/0    00:00:00 grep mail
> > [root at rhel1 root]$
> > [root at rhel1 root]$ ps -aeef | grep master
> > root   19081 18945  0 20:24 pts/0    00:00:00 grep master
> > [root at rhel1 root]$
> > 
> > Yet root has 123 messages. Where are they being served-up from????
> 
> That depends on a number of things - firstly what mail server is running 
> (if any) and if no server is running, how the host has been setup to 
> submit mail. The old version of sendmail simply checked to see if mail 
> was local and wrote it directly to the local user mbox (/var/spool/mail) 
> - this all changed a wee while back (redhat 9 i believe, may have been 
> FC1
|[AE]S3 tho) and used an SMTP submission system that would still 
> allow you to submit mail with /bin/mail even if you were running 
> something like postfix/qmail/etc that delivered to a different location 
> or format.
> 
> To find out, you need to first see if you are listening on port 25, to 
> do this try
> 
> netstat -an | grep LIST | grep :25
> 
> The output should look something like..
> 
> [root at wibble steve]# netstat -an | grep LIST | grep :25
> tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:25                  0.0.0.0:* 
>      LISTEN
> 
> where the first set of 0.0.0.0s is your local address, this may be an IP 
> (127.0.0.1 or your external IP) as well.
> 
> This tells you that there is something listening on port 25, from here 
> we can find out what it is, under linux, you can pass netstat the -p 
> flag that tells it to query the /proc filesystem to tell you which 
> process is doing the listening, issue the following.
> 
> netstat -anp | grep LIST | grep :25
> 
> The output should look something like..
> 
> [root at wibble steve]# netstat -anp | grep LIST | grep :25
> tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:25                  0.0.0.0:* 
>      LISTEN      10169/tcpserver
> 
> Here we can see on my box we are running a program called "tcpserver" 
> which is listening for inbound port 25 connections (SMTP) - in my case, 
> tcpserver is set to call qmail-smtpd which then looks after reciving 
> mail, yours may be something different.
> 
> you can also check out /var/log/messages and _usually_ /var/log/maillog 
> as well to see if there is any mail activity, this will also let you 
> know whats going on with the mail subsystem and should be the first port 
> of call when investigating "weirdness"
> 
> HTH,
> 
> -- 
> Steve.
> 
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