Re: [gentoo-user] Postfix broken

[Stroller]

On 14/11/2010, at 5:57am, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:

> Some time ago, it appears, postfix stopped working for me.  I am no longer able
> to use it to send mail (usually to my ISP, where it gets routed).
> ...
> I don't even know where to start on this.  Can anyone give me a shove in the
> right direction.  I'm pretty good at this, but I only configured Postfix once and it
> was a long time ago.

Start configuring Postfix again from scratch, following the guide (E.G. <http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Postfix>). For a basic install of Postfix - i.e. outgoing proxy, on your LAN, behind a router - then there's very little you need to configure. About 3 or 4 lines in main.cf.

You should be doing stuff like telnetting to port 25 <http://www.yuki-onna.co.uk/email/smtp.html> and `sendmail kevin < file.txt` (assuming kevin is a valid local user and you know how to read the mailbox). If there's no reply on port 25 then you know postfix isn't starting.

Seriously, the first place to look is ALWAYS the logs.

Once you've got mail working, consider something like:
$ grep ELOG /etc/make.conf
PORTAGE_ELOG_CLASSES="warn error log"
PORTAGE_ELOG_SYSTEM="save mail"
PORTAGE_ELOG_MAILURI="root"
PORTAGE_ELOG_MAILFROM="portage@yourhostname"
$ 

Note that postmaster & root should be configured in /etc/mail/aliases - typically postmaster -> root, root -> you. About the hardest part of setting up a Postfix install is running the newaliases command.

Stroller.