Subject: inetd killing pop3d

From: Al Youngwerth <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Aug 1996 14:16:30 -0600

I'm running Debian 1.1 with the kernel upgraded to 2.0.6. Everything has been working smooth until the last couple of days. Both yesterday and today, my pop3d stopped on me. There was nothing in the logs (that I could find) yesterday but in today's daemon.log I found

inetd[139]: pop-3/tcp server failing (looping), service terminated

My Linux box serves about 10 Windows PCs for e-mail, most are set to poll for mail every 10 minutes, so on average, pop3d gets a request once every minute. Every 30 minutes, my Linux box dials my ISP to popclient mail off their mail server into the Linux box accounts. I thought there may be a conflict between popclient and pop3d accessing users mailboxes but my logs showed that popclient wasn't running during the time of the failure and pop3d hadn't logged a request for 92 seconds.

Anyone know what the inetd daemon.log entry means or what may be causing it? 

Thanks,

Al Youngwerth
[email-masked]

---

From: [email-masked] (Bernd Eckenfels)
Date: Thu, 15 Aug 1996 01:50:33 +0200 (MET DST)

Hi,

> Anyone know what the inetd daemon.log entry means or what may be causing =
> it?=20

There is a limt of 40connections/minute in inetd. If you have more
connections in a minut inetd will disable the service for 10minutes for
loop-prevention. You can specify a higher limit for the servive with:

pop-3          stream  tcp     nowait.100  root    /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/sbin/in.pop3d
                                     ^^^^

NOTE: since you wrote you wont get that many requests there is eighter an
error in the connection detection of inetd, or your pop3d isnt executed
everytime a connection is comming in (check hosts.* and the tcpd syslog).

Greetings
Bernd
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