the weirdest thing happened…

/etc/init.d/qmail restart

wouldn’t give any errors.

however, trying to restart with plesk services management and the service would never start. this is because plesk checks Qmail with:

telnet localhost 25
AND
/usr/local/psa/admin/bin/mailmng –status-smtpd

hmmm, qmail is running with the status check but not listening / bound to port 25. what controls this on ubuntu? xinet.d…

turns out after upgrade, my /etc/xinetd.d/smtp_psa file was empty!!! i created a new one

stmp_psa xinet.d file:

service smtp
{
id = smtp-localhost
socket_type = stream
protocol = tcp
wait = no
disable = no
user = root
instances = UNLIMITED
bind = localhost
server = /var/qmail/bin/tcp-env
server_args = /var/qmail/bin/relaylock /var/qmail/bin/qmail-smtpd /var/qmail/bin/smtp_auth /var/qmail/bin/true /var/qmail/bin/cmd5checkpw /var/qmail/bin/true
}

after saving smtp_psa file i restarted xinet.d and QMail is working again…

/etc/init.d/xinetd restart