[CentOS] Could not connect to host box.domain.tld

Thu Jan 24 16:38:49 UTC 2008
Craig White <craig at tobyhouse.com>

On Thu, 2008-01-24 at 16:30 +0000, Anne Wilson wrote:
> > >
> > > That looks a bit odd.  Apart from that, I can't see anything relevant.
> >
> > ----
> > the first 4 lines of /etc/hosts should look like this and apparently,
> > yours doesn't...
> >
> > # head -n 4 /etc/hosts
> > # Do not remove the following line, or various programs
> > # that require network functionality will fail.
> > 127.0.0.1       localhost.localdomain localhost
> >
> > ::1             localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6
> >
> > Fix this first
> >
> They do look exactly like that :-)
> 
> Two minutes ago the problem was solved.  Sheer stupidity.  I had forgotten to 
> chkconfig on.  Dovecot is now running and it looks as though I can now 
> continue with preparing the account to take over the work.
> 
> Thanks to all who tried to help.
----
glad you fixed it

this is what I was responding to...

> > > # telnet localhost 110
> > > ..
> > > # telnet localhost 143
> > > ..
> >
> > Both these produce ''Temporary failure in name resolution'.

so it seemed obvious that at some point, you had a defective /etc/hosts
because if dovecot were not running, that wouldn't be the message. For
example, this is what happens when I do this from a CentOS 5 server that
isn't running POP3/IMAP server...

# telnet localhost 110
Trying 127.0.0.1...
telnet: connect to address 127.0.0.1: Connection refused
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused

# telnet localhost 143
Trying 127.0.0.1...
telnet: connect to address 127.0.0.1: Connection refused
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused

Craig