Iplanet MS 5.2 Too many failures to this host during this run skipping ...

Question

Hello every body,
I'm DBA (Oracle) and I've been replacing a System Administrator who left suddenly the company, I work on iplanet messaging server 5.2
The company use a domain like email.company.xx it's the server root so we can send and receive without probleme
when we send from others domains which are hosted by this server we can't receive, I've tried whith outlook then I've received automatically Spams.
In the log file
1/ when I try from the domain root to another domain (in the same server) I have "initial status response expected"
2/ when I try from a domain to the same domain (not the root) I have "Too many failures to this host during this run; skipping this host: Try again later"
I thought of the tcp_local config, I checked imta.cnf but nothing.
How do I resolve this problem
Please help!
Regards
Edited by: dj_admin on Jun 1, 2010 9:09 AM

Answer 1

Messaging Server 5.1 is beyond the EOL Shane described previously. The date after which you can not even open support calls for 5.1 was 6 years ago, March 2004. See [http://wikis.sun.com/display/CommSuite/Messaging+Server+EOL+Dates].
There will be no further bug fixes for 5.2, 6.0, and 6.1, but you can still open support cases about them. The "last bug fix" date for 6.2 is this month, June 2010.
The "Too many failures to this host during this run; skipping this host: Try again later" error means what it says: there have been too many previous failures trying to relay messages to this host, so the message is being put back in the queue to be retried later. So you need to look at what those failures were.
The "initial status response expected" error means that the smtp_client process on this system connected to the TCP port on the remote MTA but never received the "banner". So you need to look at what is happening on that remote system or in the network. Perhaps there is a firewall in between? You could use something like snoop to see what is happening at the TCP level. But...
You describe the messages having this problem as being "from domain to the same domain" and the mail.log_current info you provided shows it is from "[email protected]" to "[email protected]" and that it came in on the tcp_intranet channel and was enqueued to the tcp_local channel.
I wonder why mail for a user in some other domain is coming from that user and going thru your system. Is that your own domain and this is an MTA system rather than a message store system?
You could try setting LOG_CONNECTION=3 in option.dat (and do imsimta cnbuild; and imsimta restart job_controller). On current versions, that will give more information about the connection attempts. But I do not know if 5.1 had that option. If that option works on 5.1, it will give you the hostname it is trying to connect to. Then you can investigate either on that host or the network.