RE: Trouble Starting qmail
There's probably an ownership or permissions problem with /var/log/qmail. Those directories need to be owned by the same user running multilog, or at least be writable by that user. My guess would be user 'qmaill'. What's in your qmail-smtpd/run file? There's an error with the call to exec in there, it appears. -D -Original Message- From: Tony Campisi [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, June 20, 2000 10:47 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Trouble Starting qmail When I attempt to start qmail the following errors scroll continuously accross my screen. multilog: fatal: unable to lock directory /var/log/qmail/smtpd: access deni ed multilog: fatal: unable to lock directory /var/log/qmail: access denied supervise: fatal: unable to start qmail-smtpd/run: exec format error I have followed LWQ to the best of my meager ability. Can someone please help this misguided soul? TIA, /tony.campisi
RE: Trouble Starting qmail
Something is already bound to port 25. Have you turned off sendmail? Have you checked to see that there are no errant qmail-smtpd processes already running? (Plus, you'll still need to correct the ownership or permissions on /var/log/qmail) -D -Original Message- From: Tony Campisi [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, June 20, 2000 11:32 AM To: Dave Kelly; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Trouble Starting qmail : What's in your qmail-smtpd/run file? There's an error with the call to exec : in there, it appears. Actually there's an error I missed upon startup. /usr/local/sbin/qmail start Starting qmail: svscan. tcpserver: fatal: unable to bind: address already used multilog: fatal: unable to lock directory /var/log/qmail: access denied multilog: fatal: unable to lock directory /var/log/qmail/smtpd: access deni ed supervise: fatal: unable to start qmail-smtpd/run: exec format error My /var/qmail/supervise/qmail-smtpd/run file contains: #!/bin/sh QMAILDUID=`id -u qmaild` NOFILESGID=`id -g qmaild` exec /usr/local/bin/softlimit -m 200 \ /usr/local/bin/tcpserver -v -p -x /etc/tcp.smtp.cdb \ -u $QMAILDUID -g $NOFILESGID 0 smtp /var/qmail/bin/qmail-smtpd 21 I took this directly from LWQ. Is the problem with tcpserver? I don't know what "address already used" means. Any ideas? tony.campisi
Re: Drop in sendmail replacement for CGI
Do you need to do this? $ chmod 755 /var/qmail/bin/qmail-inject -D - Original Message - From: "Andrew Hill" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, June 19, 2000 8:53 AM Subject: Drop in sendmail replacement for CGI Hi, I've just installed QMail, and am trying to use the drop in replacement for sendmail in /var/qmail/bin/. Whenever I run the program, I get the following error: sendmail: fatal: unable to run qmail-inject Anyone able to help? TIA, -- Andrew Hill
Re: Help on qmail-qstat
If you have messages in the queue that are 4-5 days old, chances are probably good that they are messages that can't be delivered for one reason or another. After a week, they should clear themselves out by bouncing to postmaster with a message stating why the were undeliverable. You can change how long stuff remains in the queue by putting the number of seconds you want in /var/qmail/control/queuelifetime. The default is 604800, which is one week. -D - Original Message - From: "System Administrator" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: "Eric Cox" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: "Qmail" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, June 15, 2000 4:22 AM Subject: Re: Help on qmail-qstat Hi eric thanks for your reply but i have seen that when i check this queue with qmail-read i see mails in the queue which are 4-5 days old. can you help clear the queue, so that i have 0 messages in the queue. On Thu, 15 Jun 2000, Eric Cox wrote: It means there are 760 messages currently in the queue, all of which have been preprocessed and are awaiting delivery. Eric Parag Mehta[EMAIL PROTECTED] System Administrator. Puretech Internet Pvt. Ltd.http://puretech.co.in/ 77 Atlanta. Nariman Point. Mumbai - 400021. India.Tel: +91-22-2833158 Support is now available thru our Web Based Support System. http://support.puretech.co.in
Re: qmail and pop3
You will need checkpassword. I'm assuming you're already using tcpserver...you can run pop3 with inetd, but I prefer using tcpserver for it. Check out Dave Sill's Life With qmail for more information. It's very very helpful. http://web.infoave.net/~dsill/lwq.html -D - Original Message - From: "Andreas Keiser" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, June 15, 2000 5:37 AM Subject: qmail and pop3 Hi I am running qmail on OpenBsd 2.7. I want to get email from my pop3-account. Do I need to install any other packages or can I do everything with OpenBsd and qmail? Thanks a lot. Best regards Andreas Get free email and a permanent address at http://www.netaddress.com/?N=1
RE: Bouncing mail w/ no reverse DNS
You can use the patch at http://www.qmail.org/qmail-1.03-mfcheck.3.patch to do this. I have used it, and love it. We were seeing MUCH more spam from nonexistant domains than legitimate ones, so this helped out a ton. Call me old school, but I think every return address should have a valid, resolvable DNS entry, so I don't shed too many tears when emails with bad DNS information don't get through. -D -Original Message- From: Sgt Chains [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, June 14, 2000 3:13 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Bouncing mail w/ no reverse DNS Forgive me if this is somewhere in the Docs, I can't find it. I would like to bounce inbound mail that comes in that can't resolve reverse DNS. A lot of net admins out there have started to not setup DNS entries for their dial-up accounts believing that this is a better approach than registering w/ the MAPS/DUL list. Personally I don't agree... but I'm getting a lot of trespass spam via non resolved DNS. Any ideas? --Larry mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Bouncing mail w/ no reverse DNS
Ah, but just because it comes from an open relay with a valid DNS entry doesn't mean the "From:" address is valid. That's what the patch at qmail.org checks, so it can bounce it to the original sender if it needs to. The problem I was running into was that we'd get so much SPAM with an unresolvable From: header that was trying to be delivered to non-existant users on our system, that it would sit in the queue for a week while it was trying to bounce it back to that non-existant domain. Then after a week that would puke out and flood the MAILER-DAEMON or postmaster boxes with "but the bounce bounced!" messages. I pretty much got sick of it, and applied the patch, and I haven't been sorry. :) As long as everyone has their "From:" address configured correctly with their mail reader, there shouldn't be any problems. If people don't have that configured correctly, well, they SHOULD. :) -D -Original Message- From: Michael Boyiazis [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, June 14, 2000 3:54 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: Bouncing mail w/ no reverse DNS Forgive me if this is somewhere in the Docs, I can't find it. I would like to bounce inbound mail that comes in that can't resolve reverse DNS. A lot of net admins out there have started to not setup DNS entries for their dial-up accounts believing that this is a better approach than registering w/ the MAPS/DUL list. Personally I don't agree... but I'm getting a lot of trespass spam via non resolved DNS. Any ideas? I tried it for about two days. I had sales people complaining that they couldn't get mail from their contacts; I had tech(!) firms' mail bouncing back to them; etc. While some spam comes from these unlisted people, most comes from hijacked servers used for relay, which have perfectly set up DNS entries. Michael Boyiazis - [EMAIL PROTECTED] NetZero Mail/Sys/Network Admin _ NetZero - Defenders of the Free World Click here for FREE Internet Access and Email http://www.netzero.net/download/index.html
RE: qmail hanging - best way to restart
What does your 'qmail start' script look like? If you converted to the most recent supervise from an older version, and didn't convert things into the 'run' file correctly, you could see this behaviour. -D -Original Message- From: Mike Denka [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, June 13, 2000 3:04 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: qmail hanging - best way to restart We are having some problems with qmail hanging and no longer responding to POP requests or smtp requests. Restarting all qmail processes and qmail-popup resolves the problem. I notice that when I stop qmail, the /etc/init.d/qmail stop script does not stop all processes, only those whose effective uids are 0 (root). Therefore several processes remain running and I must wait for them to terminate to restart. This can be quite a long time (sometimes the processes seem to be hung and never terminate naturally). Two questions: 1) anyone else notice this problem with both qmail pop and qmail smtp hanging (on Solaris 7 running on an E250 with 512 MB RAM - using tcpserver to fork the processes - note: this does NOT seem to be related to the previous thread on Solaris 7 problems - that thread mentioned thousands of qmail processes stalling, I never have more than 40 or 50). 2) Is there any reason that qmail processes whose effective uid is not 0 shouldn't be killed when stopping and restarting? Thanks, Mike
Re: Performance degradation when queuing a message to thousands of recipients
I would do one of two things instead: 1) Set up a .qmail-something file with all the addresses you want to send to (don't know about performance here, but I wouldn't think it would be too bad), and send the email to that address. It will forward a copy to everyone in that .qmail file. Using a custom SQL query, it would be trivial to export it into a single entry per line, and drop it into a .qmail file. 2) Set up and use ezmlm and use a closed mailing list to do it. This may be overkill for what you're trying to do, if you don't use it very often. Either way, you send one email and let qmail take care of the rest of the work, rather than having to wait for 1000+ messages to be delivered from your outbox, or direct SMTP connection. -D - Original Message - From: "Manuel Lemos" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, June 13, 2000 5:00 PM Subject: Performance degradation when queuing a message to thousands of recipients Hello, Once in a while I havce to send out a message to thousands of users from a variable set. So, I make a custom database query to extract the recipients list. Then I establish a SMTP connection to a qmail server. My problem is that along the time the number of recipients has been growing to many thousands but the time that queueing takes does not grow linearly with the number of recipients but rather grows exponentially. I am taking advantage of the PIPELINING SMTP extension to reduce the overhead of waiting for the response from the STMP server. I take care of not pipe more than 100 recipients at a time before waiting for the server response to all to not exceed the TCP window size to avoid SMTP dialogue deadlock. Once I decide to make my connection code to output the dialogue between the SMTP client and the server and I noticed that periodically the dialogue hangs for a little while and then it proceeds. Response hang periods do not happen right after queing the current batch of 100 piped recipients. Does anybody know how to explain this? Is there a cure? Would spliting the queueing in many different messages help? If so, how many recipients are recommended per batch? Regards, Manuel Lemos Web Programming Components using PHP Classes. Look at: http://phpclasses.UpperDesign.com/?[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] URL: http://www.mlemos.e-na.net/ PGP key: http://www.mlemos.e-na.net/ManuelLemos.pgp --
Re: Psuedo-benchmarks?
Well, we don't run an enormous setup, but here's some stats on one of our busiest servers: 400MHz Pentium II 256 MB RAM RAID 5 on IBM UltraStar 7200RPM drives RH Linux 6.2 with the latest kernel (2.2.16) This box supports 4000 - 4500 SMTP and POP3 customers, with no signs of slowing down. Now to be fair, it also does their web pages and a little bit of RealAudio for them. Our traffic on this box is probably 25,000 - 30,000 messages a day. Fairly small by most counts. Anyway, we had been on a 200MHz machine with sendmail and it was eating our lunch. After we moved to this box in February, our load average was generally between 0.00 and 0.10 if nobody was running Real Audio (the qmail stuff was SO efficient!!). UNTIL...we were getting so pounded with spam I decided to apply Nagy Balazs' patch that ensures that each incoming email has a valid domain in it's return address, so it won't accept any mail that it cannot bounce (since a lot of spam tends to come from things like [EMAIL PROTECTED]) The added overhead of doing a DNS queries for email has bumped up the system load a little. It now hovers between 0.00 and 0.15. :) Our customers are extremely pleased with our performance increase since February. And recently they've been even more pleased since we've eliminated 75% of the SPAM we used to get with this patch we applied. One other note...when we made this move from sendmail to qmail in February, in the 10 hours we were down for the switch, we had queued 2500 emails on our backup MX (also a qmail box). We dequeued, and they were all delivered in about 90 seconds. In April, we took over about 300 customers for a smaller company near us, and decided to bring up a sendmail box and put them on there for a couple weeks until we could merge them onto an established server. During the move, we queued about 300 messages. qmail dequeued as fast as sendmail could take them, but sendmail still hadn't accepted all the messages after 90 MINUTES. That sold me. No more sendmail for me. I absolutely LOVE qmail. We are in the process of converting EVERY sendmail box we have over to qmail, and have never regretted moving to qmail at all. I have detailed instructions for the rest of our admin crew, and once a RedHat box is installed, we can get qmail up and running on it in about 30 minutes, and that's SMTP and POP3, fully configured, fully ready to accept mail. 30 MINUTES!! We run nothing out of inetd (all tcpserver, including our POP3), and run the latest supervise around everything. We don't do any of the big TODO patches...we're not big enough to warrant those yet, I don't think. We run everything with Maildir. The advice I got when I was first starting to work with qmail was "you'll be buying me beers a year from now if you use Maildir". I owe that man a KEG. :) So...print this email out. Give it to your potential customers! I would ask them to read the next line carefully: If you switch to qmail, you will NEVER regret it. EVER. :) I'd be happy to answer any questions this email might bring up! -D - Original Message - From: "Eric Cox" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, June 10, 2000 2:48 AM Subject: Psuedo-benchmarks? Hi All! Okay, here's a chance for all of you guys that run huge sites to brag a little. I run several smallish qmail installations and am trying to convince a couple of larger MS-Centric ISPs (that get ALOT of spam) to let me switch them over to qmail - and increase my cash-flow in the process of course. :) And I need a favor... What I'm looking for are not really benchmarks; I realize the futility of accurately benchmarking an MTA. But if I could get a rough idea of how much volume a real-world qmail system can handle on a given set of hardware, it would go a long way toward making my case for qmail. So, if you're so inclined, could you send me a message with your basic setup (like CPU/Speed,RAM,OS,HDs,connection in/out), approx. number of users, approx. volume of mail, and a rough idea of how well the machine(s) are handling the volume, etc... It's probably a good idea to refrain from cluttering up the list with this kind of traffic, so you should send them directly to me - if there's any demand for the data I can post a synopsis to the list for all to enjoy. Thanks very much in advance, Eric
RE: Virt Domains: All work but one oddball ...
Mark, try a file like this in ~alias: .qmail-sub1:itco:com-jane:doe I think you need to substitute a ":" for ALL ".", including usernames... -D -Original Message- So I have ".itco.com" in my rcpthosts to catch all such "subdomains" and in my virtualdomains I have: sub1.itco.com:alias-sub1.itco.com sub2.itco.com:alias-sub2.itco.com with qmail files like so: .qmail-sub1:itco:com-jane.doe .qmail-sub2:itco:com-alice .qmail-sub2:itco:com-bob all containing the appropriate forwarding addresses. I think this should all work, but when mail is delivered to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ... it bounces with a "no such mailbox" error: Sorry, no mailbox here by that name. (#5.1.1) Any ideas? -- Mark Drummond|ICQ#19153754|mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] UNIX System Administrator|Royal Military College of Canada The Kingston Linux Users Group|http://signals.rmc.ca/klug/ Saving the World ... One CPU at a Time Please excuse me if I am terse. I answer dozens of emails every day.
