RE: [cobalt-users] RaQ3 Sendmail Problems

[Joseph R Brennskag <jbrennsk@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cobalt-users-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:cobalt-users-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Jim Scott
> Sent: Monday, September 16, 2002 8:46 PM
> To: cobalt-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [cobalt-users] RaQ3 Sendmail Problems
>
>
> In the last few days we have had our sendmail server stop responding.
> Outgoing service works fine but incoming stops working.
>
> What I am seeing is lots of SMTP connections from various
> authorized clients
> that are stuck in the data portion of sending a message. After so many of
> these connections the SMTP server complains the MaxClients has been
> exceeded. I have increased this from 12 to 25 and same results. I have one
> user who has called so far complaining he is unable to send email. In
> looking at a netstat -a I see that he has around 12-15 connection in the
> ESTABLISHED state at any given moment and all of the sendmail logs show
> nothing past DATA for those connections. The mailq shows lots of
> "no control
> file"  for all of his connections as well as several others.
>
> Soon after SMTP dies on receiving email. A stop and start of
> sendmail fixes
> for about 30 minutes. Load averages look ok, nothing to bad.
>
> Any idea what to check?
>
> Jim

Jim

We had a very similar issue.  Sendmail would open a process and never
terminate.  It turned out that one of our clients with multiple user
accounts had a virus that had infected several of their desktop machines and
they were tying up sendmail.  We discovered this by looking at the mail
queue and noticed a large number of messages that contained the virus that
were undelieverable and of course sendmail just keeps on trying to deliver
them.  After we notified the client, they have cleaned most of their
machines (not all) and sendmail is fine again.

Hope that helps.

Joe Brennskag
Hardy Telecom
joe@xxxxxxxxxxxx