Tag Archives: POP

Fix POP/SMTP not working in Sophos UTM

It all started with an innocent enough e-mail:

Data Disk is filling up - please check. Current usage: 100%

I couldn’t find any clear information about what to do about this on Sophos’ forums. My data disk was full. What to do?

I can tell you what not to do – delete random files. I thought my solution would be to log into the UTM’s console and run a du -hsx /* to see where the space was. I found a large folder inside /var/storage – /var/storage/cores/httpd.16438. I removed it, because why not?

It turns out that did some weird things to my UTM. After removing that folder I kept getting spammed with these e-mails, once every hour:

Pop3 proxy not running - restarted

It took me a while to realize, but this also meant all e-mails relayed to the UTM were not being delivered. The entire POP/SMTP subsystem of the Sophos UTM was hosed. I could not find anything on the Sophos forums. After scratching my head I decided to have a deeper look at the logs. From the command line I issued

ls -ltr /var/log

and began reading the most recent logs.

pop3.log let me know what the problem was:

pop3proxy[9270]: Can't connect to database, retrying in 10 seconds: could not connect to server: Connection refused

I could not find any useful fixes for this error. I kept digging.

selfmon.log wasn’t much help other than to confirm that pop3 was having some serious issues. It was an endless abyss of repeated error messages:

selfmonng[3818]: W NOTIFYEVENT Name=pop3proxy_running Level=INFO Id=117 suppressed
...
selfmonng[3818]: W actionCmd(+): '/var/mdw/scripts/pop3 restart'

system.log put me on the right track:

ulogd[5107]: pg1: connect: could not connect to server: No such file or directory

 

Finally, we’re getting somewhere! After some searching I learned that pg1 is the postgresql database Sophos uses. I found a way to rebuild from this forum post.

One simple command did the trick:

/etc/init.d/postgresql92 rebuild

This rebuilt the postgresql database that I apparently corrupted when I removed files with reckless abandon. My e-mails work again!