No outbound SMTP connections

We have two Win2K Servers, each running a specific application with it's own SMTP server. Since Monday afternoon one of the servers cannot send out email. In fact, no smtp connections can be made *from* this machine.

From App1 (the good one), I can telnet to port 25 on *both* Servers as well as our exchange server. From App2 (the bad one), when I try to telnet to port to even the local machine, I immediately get a message that says the connection failed. This tells me that it is a local problem, in that I cannot even get to the same machine on port 25, so its not a firewall or route problem (as far as I can tell). I have disabled the applications SMTP service, but I still have the same problem.

The machine was rebooted on Monday and about four minutes later we got the first error in our application log that says "Mail server exchange.domain.org gives an error when try to send mail ". However, since I have the same problem when even trying to connect to the *local* SMTP server, I do not believe that it has to do with the exchange server. It appears that it is a local problem.

When I try the connection, I **immediately** get the error (translated from German):

Connecting to 10.2.29.15...Could not open a connection to host on port 25 : connect failed.

I checked the IP settings and no ports are blocked at all, and there is no local firewall software (as far as I can tell). I tried to find something through google, but none of the suggestion apply or had any effect. I am completely at a loss of where to look further. Any help is greatly appreaciated.

Regards,

Jim Mohr

 

Hi
Had a similary problem once - discovered that the local administrator had added a virusscanner (NetShield) which blocked for SMTP. Is it the build-in smtp service ? If so try to increase the log-level and see what happens (logfiles are located default at c:\winnt\system32\logfiles)

regards /ti

 

Thanks for that little shove!!! There is a virus scanner (McAfee) on but it was shown as "stopped ". When I stop it, so that the status field is empty, I can then telnet out on port 25.
The odd thing is that the two app servers seem to be configured the same, but outbound SMTP only works on the one App server when the McAfee is not running. At any rate I now know the cause. Thanks again.

Regards,

Jim Mohr

 

ok - this is a settings which can be applied to a whole domain through their security center - in fact a very powerfull thing - the new Macafee netshield package allows you to restrict protocols and programs - which in fact not is a part of the virusscanner but more a part of the security center - but still in the same applikation.
Regards /ti