OK, forgive a slightly complicated question from a total noob. I am trying to run a mail server with webmail capability from my server. My server is Debian Sarge running Postfix with Courier IMAP and Courier POP3, Postfix is using MySQL to identify the users and virtual domains. The webmail is SQwebmail. This was all working fine and dandy until I started fiddling around with BIND on the server. I followed some instructions I found to install BIND and run it out of a chroot jail. This didn't seem to go quite according to plan (in the process I deleted my /etc/resolv.conf file, I think this might be relevant information), but that wouldn't have mattered, but now it seems that Postfix is not delivering the mail any more, and the queue's just getting longer. I get the following error in my mail.log file:

postfix/virtual[2439]: fatal: gethostbyname: Resource temporarily unavailable

After googling around on gethostbyname, it seems that this is a DNS problem, so my assumption is that this could be fixed by undoing the damage I did with the bind. However, because I followed instructions to move /etc/bind to /var/lib/named/etc/, it seems I can't just reinstall bind9, as the command apt-get remove bind9 gives:

Stopping domain name service: namedrndc: connect failed: connection refused

So...to be honest, I'm a bit stuck. All I really want to do is to get postfix working again, and to do that I need to fix this gethostbyname problem, but I'm really not sure how to go about this. Does anyone have any suggestions? I'd be eternally grateful.

Thanks

It seems like your box now has problems translating names to IP addresses.

Try:
ping www.google.com

If the answer is:
PING www.l.google.com (64.233.167.104): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 64.233.167.104: icmp_seq=0 ttl=237 time=63.2 ms

Stop here and wait for another answer. I don't know

else...

If you get an "unknown host" message or similair:
Fix the resolve problem.
Kill the DNS server on your machine by killing bind9
Edit the /etc/resolv.conf file, and put at least one line in:

nameserver your.isp.nameserver.ip

If you don't know what your ISP's name server is, enter:

nameserver 165.87.194.244

That one will work as well

At least you should have a workable system now, and you can explore what the rest of your problems is. You don't really need to run bind9 unless you have a LAN and you want to be able to look up local DNS addresses. Otherwise using your ISP's DNS is good enough in 90% of all cases.

jlinkels

Thank you very much indeed for your help, I ran apt-get remove bind9, and although it came back with an error the first time, the second time it said "bind9 not installed", so can I assume that bind9 is killed?

Do

"ps ax | grep bind"

to see if there is any bind process running.

If there is, note the PID (first column) and do:

"kill nnnn"

where "nnnn" is the PID.

I am not sure whether apt-get kills running processes if it uninstalls the package.

Enter all commands without quotes

jlinkels

Thank you very much for your help, that's very kind of you. I now have postfix running fine, so I'm extremely grateful.