Server not emailing

Discussion in 'Site & Server Administration' started by j66788, Oct 7, 2009.

  1. #1
    Hi,

    On a vBulletin forum that I use, the email notifications have been broken for some weeks. The tech guy has gone awol, and so I've volunteered to have a look. I'm not experienced in server administration, but I'm trusted by the site owners as I've been an admin to the forum before.

    Domain: britishchineseonline.com
    IP: 66.111.36.90

    The last time the server managed to sendmail was around 10th September as that was the last new registrant who posted.

    It was suggested that the MX records were set up incorrectly. They were

    |Pref|Hostname |IP |
    |10 |66.111.36.90.britishchineseonline.com |0.0.0.0 |


    and then I had these changed to

    |Pref|Hostname |IP |
    |10 |britishchineseonline.com |66.111.36.90 |


    but the server was still not emailing. When an email address is changed on the forum, an email is sent to reactivate the account before you can continue to post. I changed the email address on my account and got none.

    After I lot of googling, from a ssh session as root user, I did

    > host google.com

    which timed out. After more googling, I had edited /etc/resolv.conf from

    -
    domain britishchineseonline.com
    #nameserver 194.159.247.72
    nameserver 66.111.55.51
    -


    to

    -
    domain britishchineseonline.com
    #nameserver 194.159.247.72
    #nameserver 66.111.55.51
    nameserver 212.67.202.2
    nameserver 92.51.159.40
    -


    92.51.159.40 and 212.67.202.2 are the IPs of the nameservers in the DNS - ns.123-reg.co.uk and ns2.123-reg.co.uk. Now doing

    > host google.com

    doesn't output anything. Just doing

    > host

    outputs nothing as well. I tried

    > nslookup -type=NS google.com

    and I get the following

    -
    Server: 212.67.202.2
    Address: 212.67.202.2#53

    Non-authoritative answer:
    *** Can't find google.com: No answer

    Authoritative answers can be found from:
    . nameserver = a.root-servers.net.
    . nameserver = b.root-servers.net.
    . nameserver = c.root-servers.net.
    . nameserver = d.root-servers.net.
    . nameserver = e.root-servers.net.
    . nameserver = f.root-servers.net.
    . nameserver = g.root-servers.net.
    . nameserver = h.root-servers.net.
    . nameserver = i.root-servers.net.
    . nameserver = j.root-servers.net.
    . nameserver = k.root-servers.net.
    . nameserver = l.root-servers.net.
    . nameserver = m.root-servers.net.
    -


    > sendmail -bt myemail@hotmail.com

    returns

    myemail@hotmail.com is undeliverable:
    Unrouteable address


    I used a real email address in last example.

    So what now? Any guidance would be much appreciated.

    j.
     
    j66788, Oct 7, 2009 IP
  2. j66788

    j66788 Peon

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    #2
    stuff to admin@britishchineseonline.com completes fine.

    stuff to external addresses gives unrouteable address.

    2009-10-07 08:18:21 1MvQmy-0001th-NS ** somebody@hotmail.com: Unrouteable address
    2009-10-07 08:18:21 1MvQmy-0001th-NS Completed
     
    j66788, Oct 7, 2009 IP