FortKnox's Journal: The Resurrection of Xerxes

Here's how the afternoon/evening/night went on fathers day (the morning was sleeping in and packing and cleaning).

Finally was ready to upgrade my server. There was so much crap in it that I just wanted to backup the stuff I wanted to keep (scp them to my windows box) and rip the 3 old hds out (totally a whopping 2.4GB) and put the new 20GB in (thanks SlashChick!!). Well, I did the backup, pscp'ed them to my win box, ripped out the HDs, put in the new one, and popped in my SuSE7.2 bootable CD in the drive.

The disk wouldn't even spin up...

So I got upset, yelled and screamed, got out my old CD burner (that read CDs somewhat, but didn't burn them. It died after 4 months. Never buy an IOMagic CD Burner), put it in.... nothing.

I commence more yelling and screaming, and finally just give up, turn off my win box, rip out my trusty toshiba CD ROM, put it in the server, and load it up.
YaST wouldn't load up (kernel panic). (looked like it )Kept trying to access the HD, mount it, and load up root. I IM'ed AntiFreeze a ton, got some ideas....
I tried loading up the HD on my winbox, fdisked and formatted it. Put it back in the server. No dice.
Tried loading up a bootdisk with all kinds of options. No dice.

Finally, I tried just loading up a version online (SuSE8.2) by imaging a bootdisk and the 4 modules. I finally got online, started it up.... and the same damn problem came up.

BUT
It offered some advice. Stating it may be an apci issue (after some googling, I found out that was... interrupt stuff for power management). So I turned apci off in the bios, and tried again. SUCCESS!

So, I pulled the CD ROM out, put it back, closed everything up, and started going through the packages to install. I spend a good amount of time on it, and finally start the downloading. That was at 12:30 at night.
I woke up this morning at 6am, and got everything working (including bringing my backups back) by 8am this morning.

My only issue? Email. I never got an option on what to install. SuSE usually went with the old sendmail, but I think I'm running procmail. But it doesn't appear to get anything from the outside world. Any ideas on how to get procmail setup?

Procmail

[aridhol]

There's a quick-start guide to Procmail here [ii.com], but I'm not sure that it's what you're looking for. Procmail supplements Sendmail, it doesn't replace it. Perhaps you're thinking Postfix [postfix.org]?

Re:Procmail

[FortKnox]

I'm all confused...

Sendmail is on the server, and procmail. It works fine internally, and it even sends OUT mail alright. It just isn't accepting any email from external sources... I have no idea whats going on...

Re:Procmail

[aridhol]

I don't suppose there's anything in the logs? (probably /var/log/maillog or somesuch file). You may also want to check (I'm not sure how) that mail is actually being sent to your machine. If it's being blocked by someone's firewall en route, you'll never see it or its logs on your box.

Re:Procmail

[Tet]

It just isn't accepting any email from external sources...

How are you expecting to receive mail from external sources? Does your ISP forward it on via SMTP, or do you collect it via IMAP or POP3? If it's the former, are you accepting mail for the right domain (/etc/mail/local-host-names)? Are you allowing your ISP's mail server to forward mail to you? Is there anything in the logs (/var/log/maillog or /var/log/messages) to explain what the problem might be? Relaying denied is a common problem. Do you have

Re:Procmail

[gmhowell]

Almost forgot: sometimes other mail agents are called as 'sendmail' so that various scripts will work. You'll have to check your rpm's and see what you have.

Procmail common use

[Ars-Fartsica]

The most typical setup for procmail is to use it on conjunction with a pop agent such as fetchmail, with the resulting message placed in your local spool, from which your email client can be configured to read from.

Alternately you can use an email client which integrates procmail into the pop process. Not sure about what clients offer direct procmail filtering.

Procmail is most useful as a client-agnostic filtering system. If you only ever use one client you may find it easier to use the UI of the client to

Postfix?

[gmhowell]

If you are running postfix, I could send you (haha) a copy of my config files. It won't let you send, for example, via Outlook (iow, only works when logged in to the linux box) but it might get you started. (I never bothered to fiddle with it. It seems to block relaying, which is a little more important than being able to use Eudora or Outlook:)