inetd killing pop3d

[Al Youngwerth <alberty@apexxtech.com>]

I'm running Debian 1.1 with the kernel upgraded to 2.0.6. Everything has been working smooth until the last couple of days. Both yesterday and today, my pop3d stopped on me. There was nothing in the logs (that I could find) yesterday but in today's daemon.log I found

inetd[139]: pop-3/tcp server failing (looping), service terminated

My Linux box serves about 10 Windows PCs for e-mail, most are set to poll for mail every 10 minutes, so on average, pop3d gets a request once every minute. Every 30 minutes, my Linux box dials my ISP to popclient mail off their mail server into the Linux box accounts. I thought there may be a conflict between popclient and pop3d accessing users mailboxes but my logs showed that popclient wasn't running during the time of the failure and pop3d hadn't logged a request for 92 seconds.

Anyone know what the inetd daemon.log entry means or what may be causing it? 

Thanks,

Al Youngwerth
alberty@apexxtech.com