On Sat, Jan 26, 2002 at 12:58:50PM -0600, Jeremy Blosser wrote: > On Jan 26, Michael Maibaum [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote: > > My favorite was the last bi-monthly report from our (win NT > > dominated...) IT dept...It was a 4Mb word document for about a page and > > a half, plus some high res pics, plus all the revisions in the word > > document. It was sent to every email address in the institution > > (thousands) and nearly brought the exchange server to it's knees...our > > dept survived as our mail is on a sparcstation, though it nearly filled > > it's disk, our IT guy, stripped out about 10k of text and sent that to > > us all.... > > A month or two ago, we started getting pages from our router guys asking if > we knew why our Linux/qmail/etc. boxes were completely saturating our > external pipe and almost taking the router down. By the time the guy that > was on call got back to work, they had shut down outgoing SMTP at the > firewall to at least block whatever it was, since 4 of our remote offices' > Exchange servers had gone down under the load. > > Turns out somebody was trying to send a mail with a 3MB word doc to > everyone in the company and their brother. Of course qmail happily > complied, killing 4 other mail servers and almost the router in the > process. We'd just recently gotten them to switch to Linux + qmail on the > corporate border SMTP, and one of the managers actually suggested it was a > flaw of qmail that it didn't crash at this point, to act as a break point. > :) > > Of course we now have real limiting in place to make sure someone can't do > it again.
Sounds remarkably like what happened to us...except it was our IT guys that caused it! I don't know if this is a coincidence but the IT department has been moved to a seperate building across town from everyone else, just after this happened.... Michael -- Dr Michael A. Maibaum - (W)+1 (415) 561 1682 - (H)+1 (415) 626 6733 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <URL:http://www.gene-hacker.net/main/index.php>
