> When this problem was prevalent a couple of years ago, I saw many > times in my Imail logs where the SMTPD has PID the "main" session, > and the SMTPD PID for the AUTH call, one SMPTD log line IIRC, had > another PID.
In that case, I think you were actually seeing *symptoms* of the problem itself, rather normal process-spawning simply *tracing* the problem. I don't have a 5.x machine to verify this on, but later versions don't behave that way in the first place. Ipswitch should've done their due diligence in trying to reproduce such a process snapshot, if you captured it. > OK, look, SMTP AUTH works for 10's or 100's of accounts, then SMTP > AUTH starts failing for the all those accounts for no apparent > reason, so the admin restarts SMTP service, and now the accounts can > SMTP AUTH again. I don't care WTF was on the wire. It's important to > admit that other people can be scientific,too. I believe that SMTP AUTH's functionality has a breaking point, don't get me wrong! I know you're not alone in reporting that it stops working under untraceable circumstances. I just don't think the error is in the the AUTH function itself, since the AUTH function*s* are actually no fewer than three (ODBC, SAM, Registry), each with different code for actually comparing the credentials; if there's no observed rule as to which DB is affected most, the problem would logically exist at another layer. I might guess that it begins during the transmission of the credentials over TCP, which is to say a buffer overflow perhaps triggered by a single network card issue (client or server, and we know what happens with LinkSys, et al.) while resources are depleted, which when combined with the AUTH hashing algorithms makes for a leaky situation (while it might not with POP3, which calls the same authorization functions, since no additional processing of the creds is necessary there). If the problem could be triggered by load alone, it would be pretty easy to isolate where the data gets originally garbled, but who has the time for that besides Ipswitch? :) -Sandy To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/
