Sendmail fails to receive emails
 

My config is RedHat 6.1 Sendmail 8.9.3. The problem is that when RedHat starts with the text base login, Sendmail doesnt receive emails but if you were to start RedHat with the graphical login screen, Sendmail works as it should.

I disable the graphical login in the inittab file, by changing the line

id:5:initdefault: change 5 to 3

Sendmail doesnt receive emails when changed to 3. Anyone have any idea on what is going on.

Are you sure that sendmail is set to start at runlevel 3?
Run
to see if it's running.

Btw RH 6.1 is quite old. Why are you still running this?

Yes it is, do a

chkconfig --list | grep mail

0 off 1 0ff 2 on 3 on 4 on 5 on 6 off

ps -ef|grep sendmail

rejecting connections

Does ps show sendmail running? What is the output of
netstat -tanpl|grep 25

You can use telnet to see why it rejects mail.
Also take a look at the logs to see if you find anything.

I'm using putty from another box to access server and su root for these commands

output for ps
[root@www /]# ps
PID TTY TIME CMD
9212 pts/0 00:00:00 login
9226 pts/0 00:00:00 su
9227 pts/0 00:00:00 bash
9244 pts/0 00:00:00 ps

output for netstat -tanpl|grep 25
[root@www /]# netstat -tanpl|grep 25
(Not all processes could be identified, non-owned process info
will not be shown, you would have to be root to see it all.)

output for telnet mail.domain.ext 25
Trying ???.???.???.???...
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused

You should run the commands as root.
Also you should use the link to the smtp commands via telnet as a reference to your case. You should replace mail.domain.ext with the name of your mail server.

I was logged in as root ([root@www /]) and run those commands, I even logged in a the actual server as root and the same was returned. As for the telnet command I used my mail server name and that is what was returned. The question marks ? are my ip number.
How is slackware run as a server, never looked at it. I'm thinking Debian (Lenny) to upgrade to when time permits.

If you were root, then how does this happens?
Are you sure that sendmail is working on runlevel 5 and not on runlevel 3? Did you try to restart it once on rc3?
What are the logs (/var/log/messages, /var/log/maillog etc) saying?

Thanks for your help Bathory. I have been incapacitated for a while but I took your advice and upgraded from RedHat 6.1 to Debian Lenny. A much newer server software. Very easy to install, thanks to Falco Timmes documentation.

Thanks once again for your help

Regards
Countryuser