Help with AUTH using a pop client

[stevenriz]

I don't know what happened and I think there are multiple hands in here but I just need to get this working again.

All of a sudden (<--classic beginning) our pop clients weren't able to log into the mail server The clients started receiving the following error .....

504 5.3.3 AUTH mechanism LOGIN not available

Now the pop clients all have checked the option "Outgoing mail server required authentication."

Does anyone know what might have changed?? Anything I can check? I don't see any AUTH lines anywhere in the sendmail.mc file at all. So I don't know if someone removed them or what.

Thanks guys.
Steve

 

[RhythmAce]

If nothing was changed, you might want to make sure that saslauthd is still running.

 

[stevenriz]

looks like it is.... I did a restart just to be sure...

[root@midav4 ~]# ps -ef | grep saslauthd
root 17233 1 0 16:48 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/saslauthd -m /var/run/saslauthd -a shadow
root 17234 17233 0 16:48 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/saslauthd -m /var/run/saslauthd -a shadow
root 17235 17233 0 16:48 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/saslauthd -m /var/run/saslauthd -a shadow
root 17236 17233 0 16:48 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/saslauthd -m /var/run/saslauthd -a shadow
root 17237 17233 0 16:48 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/saslauthd -m /var/run/saslauthd -a shadow
root 17247 17177 0 16:49 pts/3 00:00:00 grep saslauthd
[root@midav4 ~]#

 

[stevenriz]

Ok I did a little more testing. This seems to happen ONLY with Incredimail. I configured Outlook Express the very same way checking "My server requires authentication" and it works just fine. Does anyone know what could possibly be different in Incredimail that would create this behaviour? I am completely confused. We might bounce the mailserver and see if something I don't know about will get reset.

Thanks!
Steve

 

[stevenriz]

Things seem to be getting back to normal. Do you think sendmail is somwhat hijack-able?

 

[mrballcb]

Next time this happens, see what is going on with your mail server by testing it manually:

[todd@tlyons ~]$ telnet smtp.ivenue.com 25
Trying 64.14.201.31...
Connected to smtp.ivenue.com (64.14.201.31).
Escape character is '^]'.
220 smtp2.ivenue.com ESMTP Sendmail 8.13.4/8.13.4; Tue, 28 Feb 2006 12:19:01 -0800
ehlo localhost
250-smtp2.ivenue.com Hello tlyons.ivenue.net [192.168.100.166], pleased to meet you
250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
250-PIPELINING
250-8BITMIME
250-SIZE
250-DSN
250-ETRN
250-AUTH LOGIN PLAIN
250-DELIVERBY
250 HELP
quit
221 2.0.0 smtp2.ivenue.com closing connection
Connection closed by foreign host.
[todd@tlyons ~]$

If you see the AUTH line, look to see what methods are advertised. For whatever reason it looks like yours stopped advertising AUTH. (Note that the only things I typed in above were the telnet command, then 'ehlo localhost' (doesn't matter what you type as long as its a valid hostname), look for the desired response, then 'quit'.

At least now you know how to test. And that's half the battle. It gives you places to look and things to rule out in the future.

Blue skies... Todd