RAQ3: All mail suddenly started disappearing into void

Simon Blandford home at SIMONB.ORG.UK
Mon Dec 24 09:50:43 GMT 2001


OK I've fixed this now.

On the RAQ3 there are symlinks for each user in /var/spool/mail pointing
to /home/spool/mail. For some reason the symlink for the user account I
was testing with was missing from /var/spool/mail so the mail actually
*was* arriving, even being virus scanned, but ending up in a file in
/var/spool/mail and not in /home/spool/mail.

Possibly, this is something I did in the not-to-distant past because I
don't see how it could of happened by itself!

I was alerted by someone that the mail server had stopped working on
Friday but it now seems as though the domain naem in question isn't even
pointing at the Cobalt server, so that's another problem altogether.

Oh well...

Regards,
Simon B.

Simon Blandford wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I just installed Mailscanner and Sophos on a Cobalt RAQ3. Once I got the
>queues on the same partition it all worked fine for a few days. Then on
>Friday it stopped for no known reason.
>
>Now incomming mail is simply disappearing in a black hole. These are the
>symptoms...
>
>1) If I go to the Web Admin interface, System Status, the email server LED
>is shown as grey i.e. no information when last tested.
>
>2) If I send an email to an account on the server, I can see the mail has
>arrived in /var/log/maillog but nothing gets as far as
>/home/spool/mail/<whatever user>, no error message gets sent to admin.
>
>3) /var/spool/mqueue, mqueue.in, Mailscanner/incomming directories are all
>empty.
>
>3) The mailscanner and sendmail processes are running.
>
>4) If I restart the mailscanner process or even reboot the server there is
>no change in symptoms.
>
>Is there any more places I could be looking for clues?
>If all else fails, what do I have to do to uninstall Mailscanner so I can at
>least have the server working again as it was before?
>
>Regards,
>Simon B.
>



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