[clue-tech] Sendmail oddity

[Jim Ockers]

Hi T-Foo,

OK I can't resist.

foo7775 wrote:
> 
>    OK, someone will no doubt state that the title contains a redundancy, 
> but here's what I'm looking at.
> 
> I have a chance to help someone, but unfortunately my experience doesn't 
> really extend to sendmail.  According to the customer, "Email alerts are 
> getting hung up in the system".  This is a red hat box, & I've been 
> given a log snippet that contains the following:

How can you tell this log snippet has anything to do with sendmail?

>     1145018099 help <IP address> 0 0
>     1145018402 1145018402 help <IP address> 0 0
>     1145018704 1145018704 help <IP address> 0 0
>     1145019007 1145019007 help <IP address> 0 0
>     1145019310 1145019310 help <IP address> 0 0
>     1145019612 1145019612 help <IP address> 0 0
>     1145019914 1145019915 help <IP address> 0 0
>     1145020067 1145020096 hr3 <internal IP> 34 1399518
>     1145020217 1145020217 help <IP address> 0 0
>     1145020519 1145020519 help <IP address> 0 0
>     1145020821 1145020821 help <IP address> 0 0
>     1145021123 1145021124 help <IP address> 0 0

What are those numbers?  A unix time?  What is "help" and "hr3" ?  What
are the nonzero numbers in the hr3 column?  I have been worked with
sendmail as a network systems engineer for almost 20 years and I have
never seen any sendmail log that looked like that, especially on a red
hat system.  I would expect the syslog format of logfile.  Here is an
example of a sendmail log from a red hat system:

Apr 15 13:30:16 tahoua sendmail[21698]: NOQUEUE: connect from server16.finalweb.net [69.13.237.132]
Apr 15 13:30:16 tahoua sendmail[21698]: n3FJUGc7021698: Milter (blackmilter): init success to negotiate
Apr 15 13:30:16 tahoua sendmail[21698]: n3FJUGc7021698: Milter (graymilter): init success to negotiate
Apr 15 13:30:16 tahoua sendmail[21698]: n3FJUGc7021698: Milter (milter-spamd): init success to negotiate
Apr 15 13:30:16 tahoua sendmail[21698]: n3FJUGc7021698: Milter: connect to filters
Apr 15 13:30:16 tahoua milter-spamd[21701]: 69.13.237.132: cb_connect('server16.finalweb.net', '69.13.237.132')
Apr 15 13:30:21 tahoua sendmail[21698]: n3FJUGc7021698: Milter: from=<office at ifca.org>, reject=421 4.3.2 graylisted - please try again later
Apr 15 13:30:21 tahoua sendmail[21698]: n3FJUGc7021698: from=<office at ifca.org>, size=0, class=0, nrcpts=0, proto=SMTP, daemon=MTA, 
relay=server16.finalweb.net [69.13.237.132]

> I'm guessing that it might be a (relatively) simple routing issue, but 
> figured I'd see if I could possibly confirm that, & avoid the 
> possibility of going down a rabbit hole...

There is nothing in your e-mail to indicate that this has anything to
do with sendmail or routing.  Or DNS, for that matter.  You will need
to provide a lot more information, including a real sendmail log, and
some context, and perhaps the relevant routing tables, if you want
to get any help...

-- 
Jim Ockers, P.Eng. (ockers at ockers.net)
Contact info: please see http://www.ockers.net/