Re: [cobalt-users] sendmail keeps crashing

[Andy <andy.brown@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday 29 October 2003 11:10 pm, Brian Rahill wrote:
> At 12:19 PM 10/29/2003 -0800, you wrote:
> >Sendmail on my RAQ 550 keeps crashing at least once a day.  The server
> >load is very light, and sendmail seems to go down during the day...not at
> >night.  I've gone through my logs and don't really see anything that looks
> >suspicious.  Stopping and starting sendmail solves the problem until
> >sendmail crashes again.
> >
> >Does anyone have any ideas?  I've already tried increasing QueueLA and
> >RefuseLA
>
> This seems to happen to me too whenever any change is made through the gui
> that effects email.
> I seem to recall a thread on this awhile back. I think sendmail gets
> stopped by the gui but the script is broken and it doesn't get restarted.

What is probably happening is that sendmail is getting a restart command from 
the GUI or swatch or something like that.
If there are mails in the queue that are being sent at the time then the 
restart command often causes a problem.
Best expressed, when restart of sendmail is called, it firstly does:
killall sendmail
This kills all the IDLE/waiting sendmail processes. Not those that are 
currently communicating with other servers.
then it tries to start sendmail with
/usr/sbin/sendmail -bd -q15m
Which fails because another sendmail process is already running (the one 
currently communicating with other servers).

A solution is to modify the init script to be more destructive. Open up 
/etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail (Or on the 550 i think this is 
/etc/init.d/sendmail)
Go to the section that looks like:
  restart)
        $0 stop
        sleep 5
        $0 start
        ;;

And change it so it looks like this:
  restart)
        killall -9 sendmail
        sleep 5
        $0 start
        ;;


That should do what you need. It is a little more aggressive but generally its 
fine.

-- 
Andy
andy @ raqpak . com

http://www.raqpak.com/  Unofficial Cobalt downloads/support