Hi all,

I need some help setting up Postfix on my Peer to Peer lan. I have a dynamic public IP of 24.195.132.227 which is monitored by a dynamic DNS service that automatically updates my zone file through Zoneedit. My router's IP address is 192.168.2.1, and the linux box is 192.168.2.103. The linux box hostname is web01.home.net. My Internet domain name is compunerdsmedia.com. I am also forwarding ports 25 and 110 on my Linksys router to 192.168.2.103.

I have modified the following items in the main.cf file but so far no mail reaches the server:

mydomain home.net
myorigin = $mydomain
myhostname web01.home.net
mydestination = $myhostname, localhost.$mydomain
mynetworks 192.168.2.0/24 127.0.0.1/8
inet_interfaces = all

Then I stopped and restarted the postfix service, sent frank@compunerdsmedia.com a test email, and checked the /etc/postfix/frank folder to see if there was any mail, but it was 0.

Am I even close on this or do I need to setup the main.cf file with different settings?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Frank

Did you take a look at the log file?Or if you can post your maillog file here,I think I can probably solve your problem.

By the way,I think your domain is not home.net.Because I think it's not a FQDN(Fully Qualified Domain Name).Your domain name should be compu..media.com.The hostname value should be changed too.

home.net should be okay within his network if it's set up that way in /etc/hosts:
192.168.2.103 home.net

It shouldn't matter if it's fully qualified....as long as hosts set it that way you can send mail to user.home.net on a local network. It'll work basically the same as an alias, or so I've seen so far.

Thanks for the speedy replys.

Here is an entry from the maillog file:

Jan 25 04:25:36 web01 postfix/smtp[4811]: 06F5E9AC8E: to=<root@home.net>, relay=none, delay=1408, status=deferred (connect to home.net[67.96.63.112]: Connection timed out)

In reply to the second reply my entry in the /etc/sysconfig/network file is as follows:

HOSTNAME=web01.home.net

And my entry in the /etc/hosts file is as follows:

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost web01.home.net


Somehow I get the feeling that these two changes were wrong.

What do you folks think?

the 127.0.0.1 is a loopback....it's set to localhost by default.

If you add another entry to /etc/hosts for your internal IP address, the system will resolve whatever hostname you put there with the internal address. This will need to be done on any machine on your local network that you want to use to email using that hostname.

I only half-tested this, but it should work....

OK, I added the following line to my /etc/hosts file:

192.168.2.103 home.net

Then I sent an email to frank@compunerdsmedia.com from my Windows XP workstation and looked at the maillog file. Follows is the last entry:

Jan 25 13:42:23 web01 postfix/smtpd[1502]: connect from ms-smtp-02.nyroc.rr.com[24.24.2.56]
Jan 25 13:42:23 web01 postfix/smtpd[1502]: 8A8919AC8D: client=ms-smtp-02.nyroc.rr.com[24.24.2.56]
Jan 25 13:42:23 web01 postfix/smtpd[1502]: reject: RCPT from ms-smtp-02.nyroc.rr.com[24.24.2.56]: 554 <frank@compunerdsmedia.com>: Recipient address rejected: Relay access denied; from=<frank99@nycap.rr.com> to=<frank@compunerdsmedia.com>
Jan 25 13:42:33 web01 postfix/smtpd[1502]: disconnect from ms-smtp-02.nyroc.rr.com[24.24.2.56]
Jan 25 13:49:34 web01 postfix/smtpd[1623]: connect from ms-smtp-02.nyroc.rr.com[24.24.2.56]
Jan 25 13:49:34 web01 postfix/smtpd[1623]: 6E7519AC8D: client=ms-smtp-02.nyroc.rr.com[24.24.2.56]
Jan 25 13:49:34 web01 postfix/smtpd[1623]: reject: RCPT from ms-smtp-02.nyroc.rr.com[24.24.2.56]: 554 <support@compunerdsmedia.com>: Recipient address rejected: Relay access denied; from=<marassoc@nycap.rr.com> to=<support@compunerdsmedia.com>
Jan 25 13:49:44 web01 postfix/smtpd[1623]: disconnect from ms-smtp-02.nyroc.rr.com[24.24.2.56]

Looks like one or more of my settings are wrong. Any comments would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Frank

Did your ISP block mail port?It's critical as I've seen that your mail got rejected. "Relay access denied."

My ISP doesn't block ports 25, 80, 0r 110, so that seems OK. I changed my hostname to web01.compunerdsmedia.com and then restored my backup of main.cf. Then using webmin I changed only a few settings in the General section and now mail is sitting in my linux mailbox.

Next problem:

No matter how I setup my Outlook Express email account I can't receive mail there. The IPOP3 service is running, so is something else I need to do to pull mail from the Linux mailbox?

Thanks for all the help!

Frank

It's mid-night right now in Hong Kong...

Yeah,if your pop3 port is open right now,are you sure that you do have your mail in your mail folder.To check this out,you have to type cat /var/spool/mail/username.If it outputs something,then your mail folder has mail.And next,what imap server or pop3 server did you install?If you installed washington university pop3 server,did you enable pop3??

Please message me again if you have any questions.

I typed cat /var/spool/mail/frank and saw quite a few messages. (Good news!)

I didn't install any additional pop3 or imap servers, I just started the ipop3 service that came installed with Red Hat 9.0.

I opened a dos window on my Windows XP machine at work and typed:

telnet compunerdsmedia.com 110 and got:

Could not open connection to the host, on port 110: connect failed. (Not so good news!)

Then I typed telnet compunerdsmedia.com 25 and got:

220 web01.compunerdsmedia.com ESMTP Postfix. (More Good news!)


The error I am getting in Outlook Express is pretty much the same:

....The connection to the server has failed. No socket error: 10060, Error Number 0x800ccc0E.


I guess I need to find out why I can't connect to port 110 from outside my network???

Any suggestions would be welcome!

Thanks,
Frank

Thanks everyone for all the suggestions. I still haven't got outlook to grab mail so I am going to recheck my network settings. I am also considering sendmail because there is more documentation in print.

Thanks,
Frank

First off,I have to advise you that don't install sendmail.If you think Postfix is hard to configure,Sendmail is much more complicated!

Yup,did you install imap2000a?It's a POP3 & IMAP4 server software.Please make a check by rpm -qa | grep imap.If nothing output in the screen,please install it.You can download it from rpmfind.net

Secondly,do you have a router or firewall?Please open POP3 port-110.And telnet to the port.If it works,then your POP3 port is open and ready.You should be fine to receive your mail via Outlook.

Best regards,

Hello,

Well I typed rpm -qa | grep imap and got:

php-imap-4.2.2-17
imap-2001a-18


I have a Linksys cable/dsl router so I set it to forward port 110 to 192.168.2.103 (the local IP address of the Linux box)

From the command prompt on my Windows XP PC I typed telnet 24.195.132.227 110 and got:

...Could not open connection to the host, on port 110: Connect failed.


Am I typing the telnet command OK? I'm guessing that I should not get the response I got if I had everything set OK.

Thanks for the help,
Frank

Your telnet command is correct.And did you enable pop3 by doing vi /etc/rc.d/init.d/xinet.d/pop3 and change the value to enable?<--Last line.I'm sorry that I can't remember the installation path because I am away from home.You can search pop3 configuration file by rpm -ql imap-2000a.And find an output path which is the most similar to the pop3 config file.After you have changed the value,please restart it by doing /etc/rc.d/init.d/xinetd restart.I am sure this is the correct command this time!

I'll see if you will have some progress on it.

SUCCESS!!!!!

I now have a working RH9 Linux mail server.

Thanks one and all for all your help.

The problem was with my MX record settings. I will be out of town for the next few days, but next week I will post a description of what changes I made so others might benefit.

Thanks again,
Frank