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

[Parker Morse <morse@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Monday, November 18, 2002, at 04:47  PM, 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.

> 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.

"mailq" was the magic command, and matching PIDs from "top" with numbers 
in the maillog.

Turns out one of my users tried sending a ~430M (yes, MEG) file to another 
of my users. The poor little Qube tried delivery right up until it ran out 
of memory. Then it tried bouncing it, and found that the bounce was too 
big for delivery as well. Both messages sat in the queue for about five 
days, with the Qube attempting delivery (and failing) every few dozen 
minutes.

Deleting the files from /var/spool/mqueue and educating the users on the 
proper use of network shares has, apparently, resolved the problem.

pjm