Autoturn Problem

[#1]

Hi There
Has anybody had problems with the autoturn server again?
I issue the finger postmaster@autoturn.plus.net command and I just get "Connection Refused"
It used to work.
Some crazy mad Farm worker took a great chunk out of one of our telegraph poles with a hedge trimmer and took the phone line with it.
ADSL been down 3 days. When I went to De-queue I just got the connection refused error.
I'm not using the Plusnet firewall and I'm issuing the command on the Server itself, still no joy.
Using Netgear DG834G version 4 in standard config (apart from the SMTP firewall hole)
Any ideas. I think there is still mail to dequeue.   
Thanks
Andrew

[#2]

I get the same here

[#3]

Still the same, will raise a ticket tomorrow morning if its still broken.

[#4]

Ticket 29624990  raised

[#5]

In which they told me to try

finger postmaster@autoturn01.plus.net
which failed with a DNS issue
So they then told me:

Quote

Can you please confirm that you are issuing the finger command from xxx.xxx.xx.x? If the problem persists. please let us know and we will dequeue any emails to xxx1xx.xx.xx for you

Bur of course I want to be able to use autoturn and said this and they replied:

Quote

I can confirm that our autoturn mail servers are up and runnning smoothly. I've just updated the details of your domain. please allow upto 24 hours for these changes to take place

But I certainly can't talk to them, and you can't so I dont think its me, or you, it is PN - but apparently not according to the person in Customer Services. So I've asked them what they have changed at their end to break things
I remember when Customer Support was good...

[#6]

After reading this thread this morning at 10:00 I used autoturn and it worked fine for me and dequeued 34 spam emails.

[#7]

I've also been seeing intermittent failures for a few weeks. Now it's not working at all.
I haven't received any email via autoturn since 5 August.
99.9% of email that comes this way is SPAM anyway but there is the odd one that is not.
I'll raise a ticket also tomorrow if the situation doesn't change.
Andy

[#8]

Well it worked for me ... once and now its dead again!
[tt]steve@kodaly:/tmp$ finger postmaster@autoturn.plus.net
[autoturn.plus.net]
212.159.61.36
Your IP address is 212.159.61.36
1 messages queued
Email delivery triggered to 212.159.61.36
steve@kodaly:/tmp$ traceroute www.wordpress.org
traceroute to www.wordpress.org (72.233.56.139), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1  192.168.0.66 (192.168.0.66)  26.197 ms  25.625 ms  25.071 ms
2  lo0-plusnet.pcl-ag03.plus.net (195.166.128.109)  41.089 ms  42.025 ms  43.484 ms
3  gi1-6-703.pcl-gw01.plus.net (84.92.0.181)  45.184 ms  46.358 ms  47.833 ms
4  xe-1-2-0-0.lon20.ip4.tinet.net (213.200.79.233)  50.025 ms  51.957 ms  53.407 ms
5  xe-2-0-0.nyc30.ip4.tinet.net (89.149.187.70)  125.374 ms  127.283 ms xe-0-0-0.nyc30.ip4.tinet.net (89.149.187.62)  128.727 ms
6  Te-3-4.car3.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.68.110.77)  132.159 ms  109.315 ms  111.527 ms
7  vlan79.csw2.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.68.16.126)  107.076 ms  105.726 ms  121.616 ms
8  ae-74-74.ebr4.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.69.134.117)  127.062 ms  131.149 ms  131.443 ms
9  ae-3.ebr2.Dallas1.Level3.net (4.69.137.121)  168.076 ms  170.061 ms  171.136 ms
10  * * *
11  DATABANK-HO.edge3.Dallas1.Level3.net (4.71.170.6)  180.820 ms  180.959 ms  182.117 ms
12  66.18.0.142.databank.com (66.18.0.142)  178.184 ms  141.393 ms  143.218 ms
13  * * *
14  wordpress.org (72.233.56.139)  151.287 ms  153.167 ms  154.570 ms
steve@kodaly:/tmp$ finger postmaster@autoturn.plus.net
[autoturn.plus.net]
finger: connect: Connection refused
steve@kodaly:/tmp$
[/tt]
Ingore the traceroute, that was me checking something.
So a work and then a fail.
CS deny there are any problems with it at all.
Hopefully maybe tomorrow someone like Bob can have a shufty?

[#9]

Quote from: SteveA

Hopefully maybe tomorrow someone like Bob can have a shufty?

Looks to me like it's not accepting connections at the moment:

C:\Users\Bobby>telnet autoturn.plus.net.uk 25
Connecting To autoturn.plus.net.uk...Could not open connection to the host, on p
ort 25: Connect failed

Without knowing any of the details, I'd warrant a guess that the servers are under extremely high load. It's been a problem on and off for a while now and I know we've been looking at potential ways to fix it. A problem with the mail queues was also raised on Saturday that I think had something to do with the autoturn boxes (ref: 57724).
I'll get somebody to take a look into things tomorrow morning if the situation remains unchanged...

[#10]

Thanks Bob
If they are overloaded and are just refusing connections then why did CS say :

Quote

I can confirm that our autoturn mail servers are up and runnning smoothly. I've just updated the details of your domain. please allow upto 24 hours for these changes to take place

If CS had simply come back and told me that they're over loaded then I'd have said fine. but CS didn't. Please look at the ticket I opened.

[#11]

Probably boils down to the fact that they're not aware of any problems at the moment. It could well be that our monitoring systems aren't reporting any issues. Either way I'll know more tomorrow and will have a word with those who've answered your ticket so they're better equipped to diagnose these issues in future.

[#12]

Its still flaky. Here are two fingers done about 2 hours apart, I wanted to sync email before shutting down the computer so I can clean the fluff out of its fans

root@kodaly:/tmp# finger postmaster@autoturn.plus.net
[autoturn.plus.net]
212.159.61.36
root@kodaly:/tmp#
root@kodaly:/tmp# finger postmaster@autoturn.plus.net
[autoturn.plus.net]
finger: connect: Connection refused
root@kodaly:/tmp#

[#13]

Yeah,
Simular problem after my SMTP rolled over. Server back up but autoturn is alternating between Connection Refused and Connection Timed Out
I'll get support to manually dequeue.

[#14]

Quote from: SteveA

Its still flaky. Here are two fingers done about 2 hours apart, I wanted to sync email before shutting down the computer so I can clean the fluff out of its fans root@kodaly:/tmp# finger postmaster@autoturn.plus.net [autoturn.plus.net] 212.159.61.36 root@kodaly:/tmp# root@kodaly:/tmp# finger postmaster@autoturn.plus.net [autoturn.plus.net] finger: connect: Connection refused root@kodaly:/tmp#

You access the internet with your root account?

[#15]

Hummm... after about 15 tries, its just worked.
620 mails... dont think I really wanted to dequeue now