Hi Chaps Well, its been a long weekend (and monday morning) but this is now finally working.
Just in case anybody else is unfortunate enough to have this bizarre problem here goes: NOTE: MS NLB uses the concept of a shared addres and dedicated addresses. A shared adddress would be the address your web site resolves to - any machines in an NLB cluster should answer to requests for this IP address. A dedicated NLB address is a unique IP address assigned to each of your servers for the purpose of controlling NLB and eensuring that any connections that need to be persistent (e.g. mail sessions) get sent back to the right server. 1. We use Microsoft Network Load balancing to share the load of the imail web and pop3 services across two hosts. 2. Both of these hosts exist in the mx records for the domain (with equal weighting.) 3. Through a process of elimination and using tcpview.exe from sysinternals I found that the smtp32.exe process (not the daemon) would continuously bind to the shared IP address of the two boxes, not the dedicated address of the host. 4. All other services bound correctly to the hosts dedicated address so pop3 and incoming smtp worked correctly. 5. Any traffic sent from smtp32.exe when bound to this shared address never reached the wire, effectively the nlb shared address became a null adaptor for this process. (I'm not sure that anything should ever bind explicitly to this address for initiating outgoing connections? I could be wrong). 6. When I unbound this shared address from the NIC and effectively broke half the site any new instances of smtp32.exe that got created correctly sent mail. After trawling through and getting a couple of colleagues onboard we decided to remove the shared IP address from the domains section of the IMAIL registry and restart the services. From this point on the smtp32.exe processes all bound to the correct dedicated nlb address. This is my interpretation of what was happening, whether this is correct behaviour is anyones guess. Precisely why these addreses were in the domains portion of the IMAIL registry in the first place I have no idea, perhaps its a default, or perhaps(more likely) it was a mistake on our part. Either way, if these addresses were present in the registry from the build of the boxes, we've just been extremely lucky up until this point that the services / processes "just happened" to bind in the right order(two years worth of good luck actually!). Any comments/observations welcome, and a very big thankyou to all those who offered your sugestions - without you it was turning into a very lonely weekend ;-) Kind Regards Ross Quoting Kevin Bilbee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > That is correct if it was the TIME_WAIT issue after a reboot the problem > would take about 2.7 days to stop sending mail. Ant the issues is with V7 > and v8.x on win2k and the imonitor monitoring the www service. > > What happens when you do a nslookup from the mail server using the same dns > listed in imail. Also try from the imail server doing a telnet to another > mail server imail is having a problem connecting to > > telnet mail_server_name 25 > > and try > > telnet mail_server_ip 25 > > > Can you connect this way. > > > Process of elimination. > > > Kevin Bilbee > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > Sent: Sunday, March 21, 2004 10:27 AM > > To: R. Scott Perry > > Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > Subject: Re: [IMail Forum] smtp32.exe not sending, dns seems fine. > > > > > > Hi Doug/Scott > > > > Thanks for your suggestions. I can see a few connections - maybe > > 30 connections > > for port 25 most of which are set to TIME_WAIT. > > > > We are using the IMAIL monitor, but if this was leaving sockets > > open or had some > > kind of memory leak, I would expect mail to go out after a reboot, then > > gradually grind to a halt? > > > > Is there any known bugs with IMAIL IM707HF3.exe? I'd have > > thought these servers > > were patched up, but if the panel problem is fixed by one of the > > hotfixes then I > > guess not. > > > > Just for extra info, the smtp32.exe file is dated 4/4/2002 > > 9:34:54am and has > > file version "2.4.4.10". > > > > Many thanks for everyones assistance thus far. > > > > Ross > > > > Quoting "R. Scott Perry" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > > > > > > > >Tried your instructions below, but with no luck. (had to close I-mail > > > admin > > > >down to save changes as we have a weird layout bug that seems > > to chop off > > > half > > > >the right hand panel - just to add to the problems) > > > > > > Try typing "netstat -n", which will show you all the open TCP/IP > > > connections (the "-n" will prevent resolving of reverse DNS entries, > > > speeding up the display). If there are *lots* of entries in there > > > (thousands), there may be a problem with something not releasing > > > sockets. Are you using the IMail Monitor? There were some > > versions of it > > > that in some cases would not release sockets. > > > > > > -Scott > > > --- > > > Declude JunkMail: The advanced anti-spam solution for IMail mailservers > > > since 2000. > > > Declude Virus: Ultra reliable virus detection and the leader in > > mailserver > > > vulnerability detection. > > > Find out what you've been missing: Ask for a free 30-day evaluation. > > > > > > --- > > > [This E-mail was scanned for viruses by Declude Virus > > > (http://www.declude.com)] > > > > > > > > > To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html > > > List Archive: > > http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ > > > Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/ > > > > > > > > > > > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------- > > This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program. > > > > > > To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html > > List Archive: > http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ > > Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/ > > > > > To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html > List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ > Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/ > ---------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program. 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