Hey folks, We've got a number of Imail servers at our company, each of which host numerous email accounts. They process thousands of local and remote emails each day. We are having frequent issues with the SMTP32 process dying silently and not respawning on these servers.
The two servers I've worked on today are both running Imail 7.15 - 2003.03.11.7. When the SMTP32 process dies, the last line it writes to the log on each server was a line about connecting to the designated DNS server on port 53 (presumably to do a DNS lookup): 09:20 19:57 SMTP-(00000630) Connect ###.###.###.### [###.###.###.###:53] (0) where ###.###.###.### is the IP of our DNS server. Both of the affected Imail servers today are using different DNS servers. There does not appear to be anything wrong with the DNS servers themselves; there are numerous other lines like the above in the logs where SMTP32 connected to the same DNS server and continued processing messages afterwards. I can also do lookups against both DNS servers from the respective Imail servers with no delays or difficulties. After the above line appears in the log, no further lines from SMTP (or SMTP-) appear in the logs, only the SMTPD lines for incoming mail being processed. Watching the process list, the SMTP32 process never spawns. The process will never spawn again until SMTPD is restarted. There have been times when the process stops spawning for hours before someone notices it and restarts SMTPD, and with the volume of mail these servers receive, the queue quickly becomes virtually unmanageable. I've been unsuccessful in trying to track down the cause of this problem. I've tried to check the last message in the queue that SMTP32 touched before dying, but it is usually gone by the time I get on the server. Nothing is recorded in the system event logs or in the Imail service logs, so it does not seem that SMTP32 is crashing. The SMTPD service continues to run normally and accept incoming SMTP connections, and queues incoming messages normally. We are running the Imail monitor service on one of the two servers, but it doesn't really help in this case since the SMTPD service isn't affected, just the delivery application. We are not running the monitoring service on the second server, so that does not appear to be the cause of the issue either. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what might be causing these issues? It's getting to where I have to spend several hours a day babysitting these Imail servers and trying to clean up the backed-up queues... Thanks in advance for any assistance you folks can provide! Denny Kennedy 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/
