Hey buddy, spare some advice for a newb?

[Snipehunter]

Hi,
I am 100% new at administering unix, and I've set up the qmailrocks installation for FreeBSD and everything appeared to work fine... at first. The only exception is that I never seem to be able to actually send or receive mail.

Client-side I get no errors, it just acts as if no mail has sent or received at all. However, in the qmail-send logs I get the following error:

alert: cannot start: qmail-send is already running

I must have messed up the supervise script or something right? But I followed the install guide instructions to the letter. Can anyone offer some advice on how I can debug and fix this?

[Snipehunter]

I found a "Rogue" instance of qmail-send running even after I had stopped qmail with the qmailctl stop so I killed that process and ran qmailctl start and now the error changes to:

@40000000405e2cb9172acb34 warning: unable to stat mess/19/89857

(There's one for most of the messages in the queue)

[Bookworm]

if you can, reboot the box to make sure that everything comes up clean, then check your logs.

You may have to run a script to flush the queue out as well. This was lifted verbatim from the FAQTS.com site

If you want to throw away the messages in the queue:

1) Stop qmail.
2) for i in bounce info intd local mess remote todo; do
find /var/qmail/queue/$i -type f -exec rm {} \;
done
3) Restart qmail.

BW

[Snipehunter]

Whew! Turns out it was a completely stupid mistake. My locals file didn't include my mail server! ;) So now I can send and receive e-mail but for some reason only on the local network. (D'oh!)

When I try to send an e-mail outside of the domain, say to hotmail or something, I get an error that says " 553 sorry, that domain isn't in my list of allowed rcpthosts (#5.7.1)" So that's my next little puzzle to work out.

Anyway, I wanted to say thanks to BW and everyone else that offered me advice. I almost feel like I can figure this stuff now thanks to all of you.

- A

[Bookworm]

Okay - if you don't have yourself in your locals, you may ALSO not have SMTP auth on (if you're sending from a machine other than the local)

If you ARE sending from the machine itself, be sure that you've followed the instructions for the tcp.cdb file. That allows localhost to send mail to non-local domains.

BW

[Snipehunter]

Ha! That was totally it, I'd forgotten to set up the account using SMPT auth. D'oh!

Thanks again!