I've just installed Slackware 10. I wanted to install sendmail from scratch and when i try 'telnet localhost 25'. It says:

Trying 127.0.0.1...
telnet: connect to address 127.0.0.1: Connection refused


I'm trying this to make sure sendmail is up and running. I added 'sendmail: ALL' to /etc/hosts.allow, i've uncommented telnet from /etc/inetd.conf and restarted inetd 'pkill -HUP inetd'. It still didn't work so i rebooted just to make sure and it still won't work. I've seen some other posts about possibly ipchains and flushing the records, but I can't see if its installed though, i tried 'find / -name ipchains'. I do know that iptables is installed but not sure if that has any effect on this problem. I don't have to get this working, I just thought this might be a requirement for sendmail to run properly. Which reminds me, when i try '/usr/sbin/sendmail start', it doesn't go back to a prompt, so I tried '/usr/sbin/sendmail &' and I"m not so sure that worked cuz the process is running, but its not set to 'accept incoming connections'. Any help at all is a step in the right direction I can try.

Thanks!

Perhaps it is only listening to the loopback - can you post the output from:
netstat -nlp

here's one example of the output, they're all basically the same...

Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address State PID/Program name
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:23 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 123/inetd


All the tcp ports are set to LISTEN. Let me know if you need any more info.

I know they are all basically the same but they are all different.

Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address State PID/Program name
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:37 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 123/inetd
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:113 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 123/inetd
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:22 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 126/sshd
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:23 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 123/inetd
udp 0 0 0.0.0.0:512 0.0.0.0:* 123/inetd
udp 0 0 0.0.0.0:37 0.0.0.0:* 123/inetd
udp 0 0 0.0.0.0:68 0.0.0.0:* 97/dhcpcd

the table didnt come out right..formatting is out of whack..u should be able to follow it though

That shows that there is nothing listening on port 25. Try starting sendmail with:
chmod 755 /etc/rc.d/rc.sendmail
/etc/rc.d/rc.sendmail start

YOUR THE MAN! Thanks a lot for that. Its now showing its listening on Port 25 when I do a netstat. I'm not clear on what that did. I know it changed the attributes of the rc.sendmail script, but I don't see how that connects with having it start to listen on port 25??

thanks again...cheers!

If you look at the startup scripts for slack - mainly rc.M - they check to see if the script it execuable, if it is then the script is run and the service started, if it is not executable then the script is just ignored.