SpamAssassin stopped working? Check loopback interface!

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 0 comments

Published on May 26th 2016 - Listed in Mail Linux

Got the following error messages on a mailserver:

spamc[11629]: connect to spamd on 127.0.0.1 failed, retrying (#2 of 3): Connection timed out

A manual restart of spamassassin only resulted in the following error:

/etc/init.d/spamassassin restart
Restarting SpamAssassin Mail Filter Daemon: No /usr/bin/perl found running; none killed.
[12244] warn: server socket setup failed, retry 1: spamd: could not create INET socket on 127.0.0.1:783: Cannot assign requested address
[12244] warn: server socket setup failed, retry 2: spamd: could not create INET socket on 127.0.0.1:783: Cannot assign requested address
[12244] warn: server socket setup failed, retry 3: spamd: could not create INET socket on 127.0.0.1:783: Cannot assign requested address
[12244] warn: server socket setup failed, retry 4: spamd: could not create INET socket on 127.0.0.1:783: Cannot assign requested address
[12244] warn: server socket setup failed, retry 5: spamd: could not create INET socket on 127.0.0.1:783: Cannot assign requested address
[12244] warn: server socket setup failed, retry 6: spamd: could not create INET socket on 127.0.0.1:783: Cannot assign requested address
[12244] warn: server socket setup failed, retry 7: spamd: could not create INET socket on 127.0.0.1:783: Cannot assign requested address
[12244] warn: server socket setup failed, retry 8: spamd: could not create INET socket on 127.0.0.1:783: Cannot assign requested address
[12244] warn: server socket setup failed, retry 9: spamd: could not create INET socket on 127.0.0.1:783: Cannot assign requested address
[12244] error: spamd: could not create INET socket on 127.0.0.1:783: Cannot assign requested address
spamd: could not create INET socket on 127.0.0.1:783: Cannot assign requested address

First I suspected a hanging PID file somewhere or an already opened listener port 783 (but then usually an error "address already in use" is shown). But nope, port was free to be used.

Only when I checked ip addr show all became clear:

ip addr show
1: lo: mtu 16436 qdisc noop state DOWN
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
2: eth0: mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP qlen 1000
    link/ether 8c:89:a5:15:6b:9d brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 123.4.5.123/32 brd 123.4.5.255 scope global eth0
[...]

The loopback (lo) interface was DOWN! This happened because this server had a network problem after the boot and the activation of the loopback interface got forgotten (yet eth0 was working as it should).
After enabling the lo interface and restart SpamAssassin, all worked again:

ifup lo

/etc/init.d/spamassassin restart
Restarting SpamAssassin Mail Filter Daemon: No /usr/bin/perl found running; none killed.
spamd.

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