# sendmail won't accept connections?

## Rroet

ok, first of all... those who just want to flame... get lost. (had enough unnecessary flaming on this forum lately)    :Sad: 

Ok, for thos real smart guys.

I can't get sendmail working again. It's a standard sendmail installation as it comes with Gentoo, I only added some RBL's to it.

My problem is as following. I'm connecting to either localhost port 25 or external-ip port 25 and this is what happens:

```

kalf / # telnet localhost 25

Trying 127.0.0.1...

Connected to localhost.

Escape character is '^]'.

Connection closed by foreign host.

kalf / #

```

It opens the connection and then Sendmail closes it again...  :Sad:  When I stop sendmail I get a connection refused, so there's not another service on running on port 25.

Please help. If you need additional information, I'll try to provide.

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## delta407

Hmm... I can't tell you (I don't use sendmail), but it doesn't even spit out an SMTP banner, meaning something is really confused. Do you have anything in /var/log that might shed some light?

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## Belboz

As already stated, does sendmail provide any information in the logs on why it may not be accepting connections?

You dont have a /etc/hosts.deny setup to deny everything to you?

Usually people have this problem connecting from an external system to a sendmail host.

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## Rroet

about the logfiles: nothing in them. really nothing... just some starting sendmail and shutting down (just as I ordered sendmail to do so)

I don't have a /etc/hosts.deny

I tripple check my iptables settings

I think I found the problem here.... VERY WEIRD and very stupid. Maybe a Gentoo programmer can bent his big head on this one.

I ran: emerge -u world .... this installed a update for berkeleyDB, after that I ran a "emerge clean" to clean out my system.

The only difference was that several packages didn't seem installed anymore on my system. Including my BIND package and I made sendmail rely on BIND for relaying and stuff.

I'm not saying I've solved it already. But I think I'm going down the right path...

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## Rroet

jup it fixed the problem.

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