Inetd: smtp/tcp server failing (looping), service terminated

[John Pearson <john@huiac.apana.org.au>]

Hi!

I receive my mail via uucp and send it to am internal machine
via smtp; that means that each time I poll, there are many (30-200)
brief smtp connections to my mail spool.

I noticed today that some incoming messages were queued on my uucp
host, and saw the following in /var/log/syslog on my mail server:
  inetd[164]: smtp/tcp server failing (looping), service terminated
although there was no sign of trouble in /var/log/exim/*.

I'm guessing that exim was forking to perform the local delivery
and was returning so quickly that inetd assumed something was
broken.

For the moment I'm running exim as a stand-alone daemon rather 
than from inetd, but I'd like to be able to use inetd because it
allows me to use TCP wrappers.  I also want exim to return quickly
rather than delivering in the foreground.

How can I get inetd to work nicely with exim?


John P.
-- 
huiac@camtech.net.au
john@huiac.apana.org.au
"Oh - I - you know - my job is to fear everything." - Bill Gates in Denmark