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Re: Help, please! telnet down, smtp not available, pam screwy



kvaughan@bc.cc.ca.us writes:
> Exim's panic logfile shows "TCP service "smtp" not found"

...that suggests that /etc/services is corrupt...

> daddy:~# telnet localhost
> telnet: could not resolve localhost/telnet: Servname not supported for
> ai_socktype

...as does this.  You probably need to reinstall the netbase package,
using --force-confnew or --force-confmiss to force dpkg to reinstall
the configuration file.  (--force-confnew will overwrite
/etc/protocols, /etc/rpc, /etc/services, and /etc/init.d/networking,
but it seems unlikely that you'd manually edit these; enough things
depend on netbase that purging and reinstalling it won't work.)

/etc/services contains a mapping from a service name to a TCP or UDP
port number, so things can use names rather than well-known port
numbers.  I'd expect programs to contain fallbacks -- even if
/etc/services doesn't contain an entry for "smtp", port 25 is fairly
well-known -- but apparently neither exim nor telnet do.

> Last, but quite annoying, I get log messages about cron(pam_unix) going
> every 15 minutes.  I didn't realize this was a normal job, but now knoww it
> for sure with the messages and the persistent --MARK-- messages.

I get that too; I haven't figured out a good way to disable it yet
(though I haven't looked hard); I'd be happier making logcheck not
send me mail about it, which should be easier to fix.  It does seem to
be normal, and an artifact of exim setting up a cron job to
periodically run its outgoing mail queue.

-- 
David Maze         dmaze@debian.org      http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting.  Politicking should be illegal."
	-- Abra Mitchell



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