Re: [Exim] Exim4 and Mailman 2.1.4 -- SMTP error 550 on remo…

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Author: John Ackermann N8UR
Date:  
To: Franz Georg Köhler
CC: exim-users
Subject: Re: [Exim] Exim4 and Mailman 2.1.4 -- SMTP error 550 on remote postings
Franz Georg Köhler wrote:
> On So, Jul 04, 2004 at 07:12:46 -0400, John Ackermann N8UR <jra@???> wrote:
>
>>Just following myself up -- I tried doing a test like:
>>    exim -f jra@??? -d -bt test@???

>>
>>and from what I can tell, that worked just fine with the final result being
>>delivery to the mailman_transport and no errors.
>>
>>So, the oddity is that the exim test passes for a remote sender, yet an
>>actual message from a remote sender bombs with "550 - unknown user."
>>
>>Thanks for any help.
>
>
> Did you restart your smtp daemon?
>
>
> Maybe it is still using the old config...


Franz, thanks for the tip. I was about to write back, saying "no, we're running Exim from inetd, so that's not a problem..." when I decided to run "ps ax" and lo and behold, there was an exim -bd process.

Turns out that although our Exim3 config ran from inetd, the new exim4 changed to running as a daemon without mentioning that in the setup. And to make things more annoying, the Debian exim4 package installs the startup script in /etc/init.d as "exim4" leaving the original version 3 "exim" startup script intact. So, when I earlier tried to restart just on principle, I did "/etc/init.d/exim restart" which told me no daemon was running... it wasn't until I'd done the "ps ax" and then looked in /etc/init.d that I discovered what was going on. The joys of upgrading...

So, a few kill -HUPs and some config changes later, the problem is solved. Which, by th way, was that the Mailman transport was running under the wrong GID... I was using "list" (the Debian default rather than "mailman") as both UID and GID, when the GID should have been "daemon".

So, problem solved after a day of frustration that would have ended if I'd thought to check whether they'd changed the daemon configuration.

Thanks much for your help -- it was the kick I needed to solve this.

John