My day of server hacking yesterday continued well into the night. I did force myself to leave the apartment around three in the afternoon to get something to eat and picked up a Postfix book on the way back. Try as I might, I just couldn't get the server to accept any incoming email. The message would bounce almost immediately with a cryptic line about how the host wasn't on the list of hosts authorized to deliver mail.
I woke up early this morning and headed back to the computer for some desperate last minute hacking before going into work. At one point I decided to try some old school SMTP command line email to try to identify the problem. I telneted into port 25 only to be confused by what I saw. The host name was wrong (it was back to the generic name originally given by the ISP). Suddenly it occurred to me that I was talking to a Qmail server and not the Postfix server I was configuring.
A little more detective work showed that there was an xinetd daemon running that was firing up Qmail to handle email processing. After disabling it and restarting Postfix everything seemed to suddenly work. I was able to create an alias that forwarded mail to another account. I also created an alias that should have fired up a Rails app for processing, but file permissions prevented it from running. I decided that this was close enough, declared success, and left for work happy once again.
