Re: [cobalt-users] email pop3 failure

[Larry Smith <lesmith@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday 12 August 2003 14:16, wcstaff wrote:
> every once in a while (about 3 to 4 times a day) our email pop server stops
> allowing any user on the server to receive email. This lasts from 2 to 10
> minutes. I cannot find where the problem is. Anyone else experience this
> problem before?

Tom,

  Yes, this has been discussed here before, but quite a while back so won't 
even try to reference the appropriate links.

  Basic problem is that every Linux Kernel will accept 'X" number of 
connections on a particular port per minute.  Over that amount and it 
"thinks" something is wrong, disables that service for three to five to eight 
minutes, then allows it to restart.

 Solution is to put an entry in your inetd.conf file for pop3 that allows 
"more" connections per minute than the default.

  Believe mine is: (wait while looking):
pop-3   stream  tcp     nowait.500  root    /usr/sbin/tcpd  in.qpopper -R

which essentially says allow up to 500 connections....

Careful about going "too" far (would not recommend over 1000) since this can 
cause severe resource problems and force the box to crash (allowing any one 
process to use up too much cpu/memory/etc space).

-- 
Larry Smith
SysAd ECSIS.NET
sysad@xxxxxxxxx