Sendmail fails - problem creating SMTP socket

[srwagner]

I am (or was) running sendmail 8.11.6 on a 2.4.20 kernel (Red Hat Linux 7.3). The installation has been running without problems for many months. A few days ago, upon reboot, sendmail began failing with the following entries in maillog:

Aug 21 12:12:40 mymachine sendmail[2421]: starting daemon (8.11.6): SMTP+queueing@01:00:00
Aug 21 12:12:40 mymachine sendmail[2421]: NOQUEUE: SYSERR(root): opendaemonsocket: daemon MTA: cannot bind: Cannot assign requested address
Aug 21 12:12:40 mymachine sendmail[2421]: daemon MTA: problem creating SMTP socket
Aug 21 12:12:45 mymachine sendmail[2421]: NOQUEUE: SYSERR(root): opendaemonsocket: daemon MTA: cannot bind: Cannot assign requested address
Aug 21 12:12:45 mymachine sendmail[2421]: daemon MTA: problem creating SMTP socket
[The above repeated at 5 second intervals 10 times]
Aug 21 12:13:30 mymachine sendmail[2421]: NOQUEUE: SYSERR(root): opendaemonsocket: daemon MTA: server SMTP socket wedged: exiting

Has anyone seen anything like this? This is sort of "out of the blue"; all other services are working OK, and the only recent change is a NIC replacement (previous NIC damaged during blackout.) I'm willing to send more info if any sendmail experts out there would like. Thanks!
-Scott Wagner, Rochester NY US

 

[srwagner]

Thanks to piti and tarn on the Linux (server) forum, I have an answer to this:

(note that I mangled the IPs below for security reasons!)
There was an entry in sendmail.cf:

O DaemonPortOptions=Port=smtp,Addr=634.615.608.641, Name=MTA

which was different from the current eth1: address 734.745.712.726 .

When I changed sendmail.cf to match the eth1: ip, everything began working.

I still don't know how to synchronize the DaemonPortOptions entry in sendmail.cf with the (DHCP-assigned) address of eth1:. I also don't know why I was unable to bind anything else (other than sendmail) to Port 25. At least I can now send / receive mail, though!