[vox-tech] mail problems with debian

[Peter Jay Salzman]

mail stopped working on belial.ucdavis.edu.  i've been playing around
with portsentry, inetd.conf and tcpwrappers, so it's possible i messed
things up and didn't realize it before.

anyhow.  the first thing i tried was interesting:

   p@satan% telnet belial.ucdavis.edu 25
   Trying 169.237.43.86...
   Connected to belial.ucdavis.edu.
   Escape character is '^]'.
   Connection closed by foreign host.
   p@satan%

so that's why mail stopped working.   next i looked at inetd.conf:

   smtp       stream tcp nowait    mail /usr/sbin/exim  exim -bs

i'm no expert at inetd.conf, but this looks good to my untrained eyes.
next i looked at the log files:

   Nov 16 13:12:58 belial inetd[335]: execv /usr/sbin/exim: Permission denied
   Nov 16 13:13:04 belial inetd[341]: execv /usr/sbin/exim: Permission denied
   Nov 16 13:14:19 belial inetd[371]: execv /usr/sbin/exim: Permission denied

apparently, exim is trying to do something it doesn't have permission to
do.  like bind to a port.   however:

belial# ll /usr/sbin/exim
-rwsr-xr-x    1 root     root       471144 Sep 20 10:34 /usr/sbin/exim*


i'm running out of ideas.  help?

pete

-- 
Fingerprint: B9F1 6CF3 47C4 7CD8 D33E 70A9 A3B9 1945 67EA 951D