🚀 go-pugleaf

Now this evening I can't send mail, though I have changed nothing on this
server for months.

First several mails stuck with message like

Nov 28 21:41:02 child sendmail[26693]: UAA25696:
to=<john@hampson.demon.co.uk>,
ctladdr=<simon@child.demon.co.uk> (500/500), delay=00:58:32,
xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=relay, relay=post.mail.demon.net, stat=Deferred:
Illegal seek

I then set netscape to post direct to post.mail.demon.net without queuing
through sendmail, pasted in copies of these mails and sent them that way.

Dejanews has only one reference to illegal seek, and that is in Spanish :-(
and appears to be someone asking the question rather than receiving an
answer.

I tried restarting sendmail a couple of times. No better. Incoming mail was
still handled ok, but I couldn't flush the queue with sendmail -q
 
I decided it was time for e2fsck and ran that. A couple of minor messages
but not apparently anything to do with sendmail files.

After the reboot, messages are now stuck with a different message:

Nov 28 23:57:44 child sendmail[339]: UAA25696:
to=<john@hampson.demon.co.uk>, ctladdr=<simon@child.demon.co.uk> (500/500),
delay=03:15:14, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=relay, relay=post.mail.demon.net,
stat=Deferred: Name server: post.mail.demon.net: host name lookup
failure       

But I can lookup post.mail.demon.net and ping it and telnet to port 25 on
it.

I restarted named, restarted sendmail, no better.

Checked /etc/sendmail.cf, /etc/service.switch, no sign of corruption.

Edited /etc/resolv.conf to bypass named and go straight to demon
nameservers, no better.

Next suggestion please!!

RedHat 5.1 server, sendmail 8.9.1, bind-4.9.7-1, absolutely nothing has been
changed for months. So it must be some file corruption, I assume? Where
shall I look?

-- 
Simon Child