[TriLUG] Sendmail doesn't send mail on first attempt?...

[Brian Henning]

Hi Gang,
   I'm seeing what to me is the weirdest thing with sendmail on one of 
my hosts.  My firewall machine, to be exact.

It seems that sendmail never manages to connect to the mail server on 
its own (mailq claims "connection refused").  However, sendmail -qf 
processes all messages successfully without a hitch, as the following 
terminal transcript demonstrates:


[root at frontgate calls]# mail brian at strutmasters.net
Subject: Hello!
My name is GUNS!
.
Cc:
[root at frontgate calls]# mailq
                 /var/spool/mqueue (1 request)
-----Q-ID----- --Size-- -----Q-Time----- 
------------Sender/Recipient-----------
kBCKMsck001138       17 Tue Dec 12 15:22 <root at frontgate.strutmasters.net>
                  (Deferred: Connection refused by strutmasters.net.)
                                          <brian at strutmasters.net>
                 Total requests: 1
[root at frontgate calls]# sendmail -qf
[root at frontgate calls]# mailq
/var/spool/mqueue is empty
                 Total requests: 0
[root at frontgate calls]#

Why wouldn't the same thing that's resulting in "connection refused" on 
the first attempt (and truly on any non-manually-induced attempt; mail 
from frontgate NEVER gets delivered unless I issue a sendmail -q on it) 
result in "connection refused" when I do sendmail -q?

I'm sure it's probably something simple that I just don't know.  Clearly 
the mail server (strutmasters.net, which is internal and has an entry in 
frontgate's /etc/hosts file) is not actually refusing connections from 
frontgate.

This is only a problem inasmuch as it means I don't get logwatch from 
frontgate like I'm supposed to.  (And frontgate's mailq grows a bit 
geometrically as each message is deferred, and then the deferral notice 
gets deferred, and then the notice that the deferral notice got 
defferred gets deferred, and...)  frontgate doesn't process any other mail.

TIA for all tips!

Cheers,
~Brian

-- 
----------------
Brian A. Henning
strutmasters.com
336.597.2397x238
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