[TriLUG] xinted and pop - how do they work together?

[Christopher L Merrill]

I've got a basic RH9 installation - on which I used the default Postfix
installation.  Then upgraded to a newer version of Postfix.  Everything
appeared to be working fine.

<background>
When I came back from a trip on Monday night, it became apparent that
we had lost power at the house long enough to exceed the capacity of
my UPS...and the server had restarted (according to the log).  Some
interaction between the cable modem and my firewall had resulted in no
internet connection - which (I assume) resulted in Apache and Postfix
not starting up at reboot.  After resetting the cable modem and removing
the firewall (which appears to be fried), I restarted the network
interface, as well as Apache and Postfix, manually.
</background>

Everything seems to be working fine _except_ my POP mail access.  I'm
guessing that a controlled shutdown and reboot will fix the problem, but
in my quest to actually _understand_ linux (at least a little), I'd like
to understand why it isn't working.  From what little I have learned, the
POP software is started via xinetd whenever a client connects - as opposed
to Apache and Postfix, which are running all the time (as a service).  Is
this correct?

If so, it seems that as long as xinetd is running (which I have manually
restarted, as well), then the POP handler should be invoked whenever an
incoming connection is serviced.  Instead, I get a "connection refused"
message in Mozilla.  The /var/log/maillog shows nothing.

The POP3 config in xinetd is as follows:
> # default: off
> # description: The POP3 service allows remote users to access their mail \
> #              using an POP3 client such as Netscape Communicator, mutt, \
> #              or fetchmail.
> service pop3
> {
>         disable = no
>         socket_type             = stream
>         wait                    = no
>         user                    = root
>         server                  = /usr/sbin/ipop3d
>         log_on_success  += HOST DURATION
>         log_on_failure  += HOST
> }


TIA,
Chris

p.s.
I'm not really sure which POP package I'm even using...I used the UW
package on another machine when I installed postfix manually, but since
it worked out of the box with RH9, I never looked.  "RPM -qa | grep pop"
resulted only in 'popt', which is not a POP mail package.


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