☩ Walking in Light with Christ – Faith, Computing, Diary

It's one of this days, when you'd wish to be dead and never born ever!

I experienced terrible problems with Qmail once AGAIN!

Most of the qmail administrators out there are probably aware, Everytime qmail stops working it's like

walking in a dark room without a light torch before you fix it up.

To fix a broken qmail your only friend could be patience. It's fucking insane seriously I more and more start hating qmail when it's broken.

I've experienced the following error messages today on our corporate qmail:

delivery xx: failure: Sorry._Although_I'm_listed_as_a_best-preference_MX_or_A_for_that_host,/it_isn't_in_my_control/locals_file,_so_I_don't_treat_it_as_local.
as well as:
delivery 232: deferral: Sorry,_I_wasn't_able_to_establish_an_SMTP_connection._(#4.4.1)/

A lot of this junk filled the qmail logs. I still am not completely sure the exact reasons

what caused the problems. However I fixed the situation tweakening some of the common

qmail and vpopmail configuration files and respectively their cdb files.

Here is the list of files I got to rebuild and the things I've did to resolve the qmail issues:

cd /home/vpopmail/domains;
for i in *; do echo +$i-:$i:89:89:/home/vpopmail/domains/$i:-:: >>assign; done
# backup old assign file just in case something goes wrong
cp -rpf /var/qmail/users/assign /var/qmail/users/assign.bak
mv assign /var/qmail/users/assign
# backup virtualdomains list file
cp -rpf /var/qmail/control/virtualdomains /var/qmail/control/virtualdomains.bak
for i in *; do echo $i:$i >>virtualdomains; done
mv virtualdomains /var/qmail/control/
# Make sure your /var/qmail/control/rcpthosts contains all the vpopmail domains
# backup rcpthosts for laters
cp -rpf /var/qmail/control/rcpthosts /var/qmail/control/rcpthosts.bak
for i in *; do echo $i >>rcpthosts; done
cp -rpf rcpthosts /var/qmail/control/
# backup morercpthosts
cp -rpf morercpthosts /var/qmail/control/morercpthosts.bak
# overwrite the old morercpthosts
# in my case morercpthosts was missing all the vpopmail virtual domains
# thus the domains missing the file wasn't able to receive mail
cp -rpf rcpthosts /var/qmail/control/morercpthosts
# Another problem if you're using qmail check user patch might be in /var/qmail/users/recipients
# Thus rebuilding the recipients file is a good idea.
# Rebuilding it might be done through qmail-vpopmail2recipients script
# the script has a bug the last if statement, where two if's have to be commented to make it wokring
# Below I'll put a link to a working version of the qmail-vpopmail2-recipients script
# Another possible problem could be in /var/qmail/users/cdb
# Therefore it might be a good idea to rebuild it with
/var/qmail/bin/qmail-newu
# Another thing to do is to rebuild the /var/qmail/control/morercpthosts.cdb file with the command
/var/qmail/bin/qmail-newmrh
# Other things I did was
# to assure myself that /var/qmail/control/me contains my mail server host name
# /var/qmail/control/locals should contain "localhost" as well as the FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name) (e.g. your domain name)
# Also I checked my /etc/tcp.smtp and assured myself everything is correct there.
# After which I executed
qmailctl cdb
# That rebuilded my /etc/tcp.smtp.cdb file
# Well that was mostly what I did to fix my problems.
# Another think that might be a good idea is to try
cd /home/vpopmail/domains;
for i in *; do /home/vpopmail/bin/vdominfo $i; done
# If you observe some domain's domain info cannot be shown
# then that might be due to some problem with your vpopmail
# It might be a good idea to check your
/var/qmail/bin/qmail-showctl
# qmail-showctl is a handy diagnosis qmail tool
# While looking over the command output
# I had to make sure my cdb files are "Modified Recently"
# and my virtualdomains are all showing up
# THat's mostly what fixed qmail for me
# Next I executed
qmailctl stop; sleep 10; qmailctl start
# that restarted my qmail
# However qmail doesn't always start logging to /var/log/qmail directory right away
# after restart
# SOmetimes the qmail server needs a couple of restarts before it starts serving mail
# Thus restarting it is always full of uncertancies and a lot of broken nerves!

I love qmail it absolutely works brilliant as long as it works, quite often

if you do even minor changes that usually means a broken qmail and qmail hell again!

I truly hope this post could be helpful to somebody out there

Here is a link to a working version of qmail-vpopmail2-recipients

Download PDF

Tags: cd home, cdb, configuration files, control, good, idea, Qmail Voodoo, server host name, var, vpopmail

This entry was posted on Friday, October 2nd, 2009 at 5:53 pm and is filed under Linux, Qmail, System Administration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.