(This post also relevant to the "bare LFs and fixcrio ramifications" thread)
Toens,
Hmm, I've been watching this thread with interest. I did post a
similar message a week ago, which you may like to take a look
at in the archive, entitled "Solaris / DoS / Broken bare LF
mailers / thousands of qmail-smtpd&qmail-queue procs", as well
as the referenced posts by TAG on 7th, 8th June. The thread
I started centred on a discussion of bare LFs (contributors
explained the ramifications), and since fixing those (fixcrio),
the systems has been behaving themselves (thank you to all
those who contributed).
Michael Boyiazis did highlight a URL (I think this message
may not have been sent to the list),
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q224/9/83.ASP,
which says (I quote), "With the SMTP service version 1877.19, if
you send a message to a server that issues a 4xx response to any
of the following:
EHLO, MAIL FROM:, RCPT TO:, or DATA
The SMTP service may issue a QUIT, and immediately try again,
resulting in a potential loop."
The actual qmail-smtpd error message re bare LFs is
451 See http://pobox.com/~djb/docs/smtplf.html
which would trigger the above fault if Microsoft's software does
indeed send bare LFs - contributors suggest it does.
That would appear to be similar to smtpstone-ing a mail server.
It would be interesting to check that smtpstone isn't generating bare
LFs, although I doubt that.
Anyway, part of my reason for posting was to speculate on why
a mailserver might get a flood of SMTP connections. The above
bare LF issue is obviously one, as are smtpstone and a DoS. In
my case, fixing the bare LF problem fixed the many-procs problem,
by fixing the thing that was triggering it, but there may still be
something that is 'broken' in Solaris 2.7. If I'm feeling brave, and
happen to be working with that system again, I'll try smtpstone-ing it...
cheers,
Andrew.
----------
From: Toens Bueker[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: 27 July 2000 23:45
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: qmail-1.03 on Solaris is broken
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > make setup
> >
> > make setup
>
> > I installed an unpatched version of qmail - using an
>
> Ahh. So it's not make setup, but rather
>
> patch <somepatch
> make setup
>
> Note quite as clean an answer I'm afraid.
Maybe I wasn't precise enough:
The error appears on the mentioned Solaris 7 machines with
plain unmodified qmail-1.03 and patched qmail-1.03 alike.
On the Solaris 2.6 machine both a plain unmodified qmail-1.03
and the same patched version I used on the other machines, did not
produce the error.
Another hint might be, that the error does not show up on a disk pair, that
is mirrored and striped using SDS.
> > BTW.: I just edited /usr/include/sys/select.h (changing
> > 1024 to 4096),
>
> Ug. That is not the correct way of doing it.
>
> Did you read the comments immediately preceeding the line
> that you changed? It tells you the correct way to do this.
Hm. From what I remember, qmail didn't care about my settings in
/etc/system, ulimit, etc. That's why I change select.h during
compilation and then change it back.
It should illustrate, that the number of open files is most probably not the
reason for the error.
> > Another hint could be the fact, that the mails, which
> > remain in the queue after the first crash seem to be stuck
>
> Well, that must be different mail as the mail submission that
> causes your error never gets into the queue.
I just checked it again. The mails were delivered at least. So that was not
connected to the problem.
> FWIW. Plenty of people, including myself have run very busy qmail
> systems on various Solaris versions and not encountered this
> problem.
That's what I expected when I started off - 'qmail on Solaris 7,
shouldn't be a problem'. But have you tested your server with smtpstone? The
error doesn't show up in the qmail-smtpd or qmail-send logs. It just
produces the '451' error - already the next mail will be
accepted and be delivered.
I just think, that it is worthwile to find out, where the Solaris bug or
misconfiguration is, to prevent others from waisting their time with this
stuff. Even if it means to downgrade to Solaris 2.6 or upgrade to Solaris 8.
I'd be grateful, if you could tell me where to look for hints, what the
problem could be. How I could make qmail more verbose, etc.
Thanx.
By
Töns
