Re: [cobalt-users] Runaway mail processes on a Qube3

[Parker Morse <morse@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Monday, November 18, 2002, at 09:55  AM, Parker Morse wrote:
> Our Qube3 has been exhibiting strange behavior for a few days. I first 
> noticed it on Friday 11/15, but it may have started Thursday 11/14. First 
> we had users getting errors when they tried to POP their mail. The errors 
> were transient and I was unable to find anything unusual in 
> /var/log/maillog.

I've been watching this in "top" on and off all day, trying to figure out 
what's causing it.

(1) One of the DNSBL's we're using, proxies.relays.monkeys.com, isn't 
responding. I shut it off in sendmail.cf and restarted sendmail. Didn't 
help.

(2) It's not spamassassin. I can see "spamd" flicker by sometimes in top; 
if it was the problem, it would be spamd processes running for 5-10 
minutes, not sendmail.

(3) Could it be bind? I moved to 8.3.4 this morning, and the problem still 
hasn't gone away - but maybe the problem carried through from the patch to 
the point release.

I found one user with a 32-M mailbox who was taking >15s to POP, but 
trimming that didn't help.

These sendmail processes - there are always two at a time - are swamping 
the box. Users are sometimes getting POP and SMTP errors, and I get 
segmentation faults when I try running commands in the shell. There's 
nothing in the logs that I can recognize as the error.

Does anybody have any ideas where I should look to figure out what's going 
on?

pjm