I am having my version of the socket problem that seems to come up on
this list regularly. I looked back for eighteen months or so in the
archive, but have been unable to find a solution. I see that "you
have a connection problem with your ISP" has been given a number of
times as a solution; but that does not help much since that is simply
a re-statement of the problem. My impression is that some people out
there really do understand this issue. So this is a request for some
information, perhaps peripheral to fetchmail, which might help a lot
of people including this writer.
My ISP's official position is that it will not provide *nix support,
which is a real drag in circumstances like this. In the past, in
fact, individuals at my ISP have helped and I have been quite happy
with them. But I am getting the impression that the knowledgeable
ones have moved on and the official policy is taking over.
My problem is quite specific, and I think that I can report it fairly
completely and accurately. But before I do that I should also report
that I have the vaguest, vaguest, memory of precisely this problem
occurring before, with the solution being given to me by someone at my
ISP, and the solution being quite trivial and "obvious". I am hoping
that this happens with this request 8-)
I have been running RedHat 7.3 since it was released, and using
fetchmail. My disc started to make horrible noises, so I changed it
before I lost something important. I have reloaded RH7.3, and also
tried Mandrake 8.2 (same fetchmail problem); currently I am back to
RH7.3. As far as I can see I have changed nothing (presumably a wrong
observation), I was able to recover my .fetchmailrc, so that is not
re-written. I have DSL via a 4-port ActionTec gateway, and a static
IP address. Other than the fetchmail problem everything with the
re-load went smoothly and currently everything over the net works,
other than fetchamil. I am able to use a browser perfectly well, I
can ssh into my shell on my ISP's machine, I can ssh into my machine
at work, I can use an ssh tunnel to run rsync to transfer files to and
from work. Since I can ssh to work I can run fetchamil at work from
home, run emacs at work and read my work mail at home - since I cannot
read my home mail at home that bugs me, but if I cannot get fetchmail
to run at home I just might re-direct my mail and use that method,
perverse or not.
So the questions appear to be external to fetchmail, and are things
like these:
* is there a file permission problem?
* is suid?
* I was forced to change my ISP password (they require it
occasionally), I have checked it in the fetchmailrc file, also via a
browser, where it works. Have I forgotten a special format for
.fetchmailrc?
* do I need to get a specific library (rpm) or other support code?
I have tried to be comprehensive in this description, partly because I
hoped that writing about it would remind me of something I missed. If
you have any ideas please post them. Thanks for reading this stuff.
dajo
Here is my .fetchmailrc, I have changed my password, the IP address
for FrontRangeMail is defined in my /etc/hosts file. I use an
essentially identical file at work, and this code has worked for
years, it is here for the record.
poll FrontRangeMail
protocol POP3
user dajo there
has password secret
is dajo here
and what happens, just like everyone else ...
fetchmail -v -v --fetchmailrc $HOME/.fetchmailrc
fetchmail: 6.1.0 querying FrontRangeMail (protocol POP3) at Thu, 18 Sep 2003
18:18:54 -0600 (MDT): poll started
fetchmail: 6.1.0 querying FrontRangeMail (protocol POP3) at Thu, 18 Sep 2003
18:18:54 -0600 (MDT): poll completed
fetchmail: Query status=2 (SOCKET)
fetchmail: Deleting fetchids file.
fetchmail: normal termination, status 2
fetchmail: Deleting fetchids file.