fetchmail, exim, dhcp
I recently installed Debian on the machine of a colleague of mine.
It's mostly slink with some packages upgraded to potato (frozen).
The machine has no fixed IP address but relies on the DHCP client
(dhcpcd) for net connectivity. Exim is the MTA.
When we first set it up, fetchmail worked fine and interacted
correctly with exim.
Then it stopped working. Fetchmail goes to the POP servers, finds mail
for the user on the Debian machine, starts to move it down and then
hangs (with no error message, even when run with the --verbose flag).
This problem must ultimately be due (I think) to the fact that the
DHCP server came down during a power failure after fetchmail had been
originally run. The machine was without an IP-address for some time,
and then was assigned a new and different one, obviously, when the
DHCP server came back on line.
The FAQ for fetchmail talks about this situation in the section on:
How to configure fetchmail for dynamic assignment of IP
addresses. That discussion suggests that fetchmail `remembers' the IP
address initially assigned and so can't deliver mail to the SMTP
server under the newly assigned address. To fix the problem ,the FAQ
suggests running fetchmail with the smtpaddress option set to
`localhost' or `127.0.0.1' (or at least that's what I think it
suggests; the prose is not completely clear at that point). Trying
various ways to do that, though, hasn't so far fixed the problem.
Curiously, though, fetchmail is not running in daemon mode in this
case, but rather is being called from the command line.
I'd appreciate any advice or pointers to relevant documentation that
anyone has to offer. Thanks,
Jim
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