This started out as a sendmail problem, but now I'm finding that
I cannot connect to localhost. 'telnet localhost' says 'connection
Refused'. Sendmail does it too. There were no entries at all in
/etc/hosts.allow or /etc/hosts.deny. I added 127.0.0.1 to hosts.allow.
The documentation at the top of the file says it's for tcpd, but
tcpd does not show up in '/sbin/service --status-all'. Nor does tcpd
show up when I do 'ps -ax|grep tcpd'. Also nothing about it in
/sbin/chkconfig.

How does tcpd normally get started, and is this even my problem?

scott

what did you set your firewall settings at during install? it sounds like you have everything except http blocked...

redhat... go to START - > System Settings - Security Level and disable the firewall... see if it works now...

Ok. I dug a little deeper and found more.

telnet is off. I think that means the daemon. If sendmail is working I should
be able to 'telnet localhost 25' and get a '220:' greeting. It works from any other host on my local network.

So. Why is port 25 closed to localhost?

I've had the firewall disabled all along.

BTW: I'm in runlevel 3, none o'that gui stuff for me.

It's not a port blocking problem, 'cuz I can get in from another host.

Any other ideas?

sorry if this sounds stupid/simplistic... im just trying to help....

but what does localhost resolve to? can you ping localhost? what happens when you ping/telnet/etc 127.0.0.1? could be a very simple missing host entry problem...

IOW...

make sure you have an entry like this:

127.0.0.1 localhost


in your /etc/hosts file...

Not stupid or simplistic at all. gotta rule it out...

ping localhost
PING localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.091 ms
64 bytes from localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.081 ms

[root@amnesia scott]# cat /etc/hosts
# Do not remove the following line, or various programs
# that require network functionality will fail.
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost

I think it's finding the localhost ip ok, just not allowing itself in.

thats truely a strange one.... Ill duck out now and leave this one to the experts...

good luck though brutha...

Got this part figured out.
See
http://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...3804#post813804

bad hyperlink.... can you redo or explain.... im curious..

Thanks- Tom

from post 813804:

I can now send mail between users. The problem was the DAEMON_OPTIONS
setting in /etc/mail/sendmail.mc:
dnl #
dnl # The following causes sendmail to only listen on the IPv4 loopback address
dnl # 127.0.0.1 and not on any other network devices. Remove the loopback
dnl # address restriction to accept email from the internet or intranet.
dnl #
DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Port=smtp, Name=MTA')dnl
dnl # DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Port=smtp,Addr=127.0.0.1, Name=MTA')dnl

Note how the entry with 127.0.0.1 address is commented out. I, misunderstanding the docmentation, had replaced 127.0.0.1 with my local ip addr. I didn't understand that the address must be removed entirely from the entry.

That's why I are called a newbie.

Thanks for your help pimpster. Although I did, in the final analysis, figure it out for myself, it really helps to have a little guidance along the way.

scott