[comp.mail.sendmail] problem with post

sue@calliope.Encore.COM (Sue LoVerso) (01/25/89)

In article <13577@bellcore.bellcore.com> tr@ctt.bellcore.com (tom reingold) writes:
>When I try to send mail, I get
>
>post: problem initializing server; [BHST] no servers available
>Letter saved in dead.letter
>
>Tom Reingold                   |INTERNET:       tr@bellcore.bellcore.com

We have seen this several times on our system, a Multimax 320, running
Mach, sendmail, and MH 6.6.  Here is the information I have been able 
to get on this problem:

1.  I  have traced it down to an error coming back from the connect() 
    system call in zotnet/mts/client.c.  When I manually try to connect 
    to the smtp socket, it appears to be stuck or hung.  A 'ps' does 
    not show anything unusual regarding sendmail.  /usr/ucb/Mail works
    fine.  Killing the sendmail daemon and restarting it has ALWAYS 
    fixed this particular problem.

2.  It appears to happen 'randomly'.  We cannot reproduce it
    on demand.  If anyone knows how to reproduce it, please let me
    know, as I would like to find out why sendmail is not listening or
    why connect is failing.

3.  We only see it about once every 3 weeks or so.

I am cross-posting this to comp.mail.sendmail since I believe it is
something weird happening on the sendmail end.
Susan J. LoVerso			Encore Computer Corp.
sue@encore.com				Marlboro, MA
{decvax, talcott, bu-cs}!encore!sue	(508) 460 - 0500

tr@jcricket.ctt.bellcore.com (tom reingold) (01/26/89)

In the newsgroup comp.mail.mh, I wrote:

$ When I try to send mail, I get
$ 
$ post: problem initializing server; [BHST] no servers available
$ Letter saved in dead.letter
$ 
$ Have I set up mh wrong?  It happens consistently on certain Sun clients
$ but not others and not on the Sun server.

It turns out that in my case, it was because I was sending from a Sun
client.  Sun OS version 4.x no longer requires sendmail to run as a
daemon.  You can spawn a copy to deliver a single letter.  What I will
do is configure mh to have send connect to the SMTP port of our machine
that delivers mail rather than the same port on the local host.

Thanks to those who gave me the leads on the answers.

Tom Reingold                   |INTERNET:       tr@bellcore.bellcore.com
Bell Communications Research   |UUCP:           bellcore!tr
444 Hoes La room 1H217         |PHONE:          (201) 829-4622 [work],
Piscataway, NJ 08854           |                (201) 287-2345 [home]