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

[Joseph Tate]

Christopher L Merrill wrote:

> 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.
>
>
Do a chkconfig --list ipop3, chkconfig --list httpd and chkconfig --list 
postfix and send the output.  The package name is imap.  Look at the 
manpage for chkconfig to turn daemons on and off.

Joseph