Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 27 Nov 2004 15:14:41 +0200 | From | Matti Aarnio <> | Subject | VGER had a spell of email dysfunction |
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For a while VGER did answer to all MAIL FROM and RCPT TO lines of the SMTP protocol "450 I am sick.." (actual text was something else) and thus refused to take any email from outside and asked for latter retry. (All proper MTAs have a queue, and they use it.)
It is amazing how many noticed the slow-down of the message flood, and asked from VGER's postmaster (or webmaster) about the thing. Unfortunately at this time the problem prevented the question from being delivered to us... Linus himself knew other addresses, and got our immediate attention.
Technically: VGER's SMTP input server's one helper program had ran out of sockets, and it didn't do correct resource rollback in all failure situations -> it didn't heal itself.
This had started to some extent on Wednesday morning (UTC) and it went all bad on Thursday noonish (UTC) and finally we became aware of the thing on Friday around 18:00 UTC, analyzed the problem, and restarted relevant subsystem. (Restart does cure some problems, this was in that group of things.)
Accumulated queues from all over were delivered into VGER in about 10 hours, and in about the same time they were also processed (delivery bounces and list messages, both.)
/Matti Aarnio -- one of VGER's postmasters - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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