Re: recipient verify defer (making calloout connection): T=remote_smtp Cannot assign requested address

Hi Marc,

Something doesn't look quite right with your primary network interface 
"eth0" versus your alias interface "eth0:0" ...

As eth0:0 looks like it's intended to be an alias of eth0 but with a 
different IP address, but they have different netmasks and broadcast 
addresses which looks odd to me ...I would expect them to have the same
netmask and the broadcast address if they are aliases on the same 
network segment.

Is it possible that you have asymmetric traffic between oddly configured 
interfaces?

Regards

Mike


On 07/11/2025 20:54, Marc MERLIN via Exim-users wrote:
> After upgrading to 4.98 on a new server (don't know if it's the new exim
> or the new server), I get those in my panic log (typo 'calloout' looks
> like it's in the source)
>
> 2025-11-07 12:12:23 1vHSon-0000000683S-3NA1 recipient verify defer (making calloout connection): T=remote_smtp Cannot assign requested address
> 2025-11-07 12:16:27 recipient verify defer (making calloout connection): T=remote_smtp Cannot assign requested address
>
>
> The problem is if I run exim in debug mode and check it myself, it works, so callouts
> only fail sometimes and I don't know how why or how to debug further.
> I picked an Email that was in my reject pile, and callout is working fine, in this case
> it's getting a timeout which is fine, but that causes a callout failure
> which is working as intended and not
> T=remote_smtp Cannot assign requested address
>
> The address is an ethernet alias, it's stable:
> eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 2c:cf:67:de:ad:5e
>            inet addr:209.81.13.137  Bcast:209.81.13.143  Mask:255.255.255.240
>            UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
>            RX packets:78656539 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
>            TX packets:74837015 errors:0 dropped:12 overruns:0 carrier:0
>            collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
>            RX bytes:10186689830 (9.4 GiB)  TX bytes:198888395897 (185.2 GiB)
>            Interrupt:115
>
> eth0:0    Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 2c:cf:67:de:ad:5e
>            inet addr:209.81.13.136  Bcast:209.81.13.136  Mask:255.255.255.255
>            UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
>            Interrupt:115
>
>
> Logs showing when things work, below.  Any idea how I can capture this better or what could be
> going wrong?
>
> Mmmh, I had to remove the logs from the Email because the exim list
> server was rejecting this Email as spam :-/
> https://marc.merlins.org/tmp/exim4.98_callout.txt
>
> hopefully it'll be better like this.
>
> Thanks,
> Marc


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