My POP and SMTP servers refuse connections!

[pushback]

I have no idea why, but both my POP and SMTP server that I have been using for years, suddenly started refusing connections from my laptop (across my LAN) tonight.

When I try to telnet from the laptop, I get:

C:\>telnet 192.168.100.1 110
Connecting To 192.168.100.1...Could not open connection to the host, on port 110
.
A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.

C:\>telnet 192.168.100.1 25
Connecting To 192.168.100.1...Could not open connection to the host, on port 25. A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.

C:\>

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When I telnet from the console, I have no problem accessing the server:

athena[root]:/root-> telnet localhost 110
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1).
Escape character is '^]'.
+OK POP3 localhost.localdomain v2001.78rh server ready


athena[root]:/root-> telnet localhost 25
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1).
Escape character is '^]'.
220 ebzb.com ESMTP Sendmail 8.11.6/8.11.2; Tue, 31 Aug 2004 00:13:23 -0700


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I have flushed ipchains and I have restarted xinit.d

Anyone have any ideas? I sure would appreciate it!

[XiaoKJ]

Did you change anything before it failed?

try refreshing ip adds and chack to make sure they are the same or something. is it on dhcp? is the lease-time elasped?

[pushback]

Thanks for the response.

Nope--I changed nothing. The server has been stable for a couple of years. One minute I was sucking down email from the POP server and ten minutes later I am getting the error.

Here's some new news on it. Two hours later, the POP and SMTP servers start working again. The next day at about the same time, they quit again--and come back again two hours later.

The server has a static IP and I can log into it over ssh without any problem.

Any ideas would be appreciated! It's really got me scratching my head!