if you're behind a cisco PIX, see if disabling smtp fixup helps.
> I'm a newcomer to the list, but I've been using qmail for about a year or
> so. Recently my original qmail server (RH 6.2 - Sparc) died (bad memory)
> and in a rush I built a new qmail server on another machine (RH 7.1 -
> 486). The server seems to run fine, no error and such. The way my system
> is setup is that I have my hosting company forward any mail for my
> yarrish.com domain to my mail server behind my firewall. So I'm only
> allowing this one machine to connect to my qmail server. I've noticed
> lately that I'm getting mail in bursts. Meaning I'll get 40 messages at
> one point, and then nothing for a certain amount of time (it's not
> consistent as far as I can tell). Then I'll get another 20-50 messages or
> so. So what I did as a test, was to allow one of my shell accounts to
> access port 25 of my qmail server via my firewall. So what happens is
> when I try to telnet to my ip on port 25, I'll get a number of connection
> refused (the number varies) and then I'll connect. Once I connect, I can
> disconnect and reconnect without any problems. Then if I wait a while and
> try again, the problem repeats itself. This never happened before on my
> old mail server.
> I've talked to my hosting company, and their logs are showing the same
> timeout message and then connect. Also, if I try to connect from one of
> my other machines on the same network as my qmail server, the connection
> is not refused. My firewall logs are not showing the packet being dropped
> (and normally it would, I've tested that as well). Now I have order a new
> network card, just to eliminate that possibility (I don't know how old the
> card in the qmail server currently is). But I'm wondering if anyone else
> can suggest something to look at, at least to eliminate the qmail server
> being the problem. I am going to fire up the old qmail server and see if
> the problem is still there.
> Here's my startup for smtpd:
> #!/bin/sh
> QMAILDUID=`id -u qmaild`
> NOFILESGID=`id -g qmaild`
> MAXSMTPD=`cat /var/qmail/control/concurrencyincoming`
> exec /usr/local/bin/softlimit -m 2000000 \
> /usr/local/bin/tcpserver -v -o -P -H -R -llocalhost.localdomain -x
> /etc/tcp.smtp.cdb -c "$MAXSMTPD" \
> -u "$QMAILDUID" -g "$NOFILESGID" 0 smtp /var/qmail/bin/qmail-smtpd
> 2>&1
>
> Thanks ahead of time for any help.
> Tom