10. Troubleshooting

If this all doesn't work right (despite my explanations), you have different
possibilities to find the mistakes and fix them.  An important tool for doing
this is ifstat, which reports which packets are on hold for which addresses.
Don't get confused, if these packets shrink after starting ifpoll, because 
this packs the mails into ZIP Files. Another good place to look is in your 
/var/log/syslog file or /var/log/messages file.

10.1 Mail is not processed

It would be a good idea to raise the debug-level of ifmail in /etc/sendmail.cf.
To do this just add the parameter -4 in ifmail (you can get more info by 
raise the debug-level, e.g. I use something like -8). To really get ahold of 
the debug-messages, I send a copy of a mail to a non-existent address so
that I get a returned message with all the debug output in /var/spool/mqueue. 
If such a returned message doesn't arrive it's quite possible that some of the
permissions aren't correct which causes the system to wait (the still running
processes sendmail and ifmail indicate this). Using sendmail the log-messages
are written via syslog into the syslog file and the "stranded" messages lie in 
/var/spool/mqueue.

10.2 Echomail is not being processed

INN should take the article immediately into the newssystem thus they should 
appear in the file /var/spool/news/out.going/*. After running send-ifmail 
they should disappear from there and you should find them in 
/var/spool/ifmail/outbound. Also check the permissions of your directories
and make sure ifnews has read/write access to them 
(/tmp, /var/spool/ifmail/fidonet and /var/spool/news/out-going/*).

Furthermore one should have a look at all the log files:

sendmail
        /var/log/mail
INN
        /usr/local/lib/news/log
        /usr/local/lib/news/errlog
        /var/log/inn/*
ifmail
        /var/log/ifmail/iflog
        /var/log/ifmail/ifdebug

To verify the created packets or fix problems in already existing packets you
should get hold of the DOS-program called Inspect which runs perfectly in the 
DOSemu. When you allow dosemu to access the appropraite directories and start 
DOSEmu as user fnet or news, then you can even change the .pkt files and 
archives.