MailScanner causing server to crash

[Gerben Welter]

Hi.

A few months ago I had a similar problem. Our Linux proxy server which had
been up for over 7 months started to reset spontaneously . At first it
would happen only once in a few days. At the end the box wouldn't last
longer than a few hours. I knew I didn't change anything to the software
that would explain the change in stability. I began to suspect hardware
failure due to heat problems (bad cpufan e.g.) Once the server was opened I
saw the problem: the capacitors surrounding the cpu looked like they were
going to burst or were already leaking. That probably made the powersupply
to the cpu unstable. The motherboard was replaced and the server has been
rock solid again.

Once I saw the capacitors I remembered reading somewhere that lots of
motherboard manufacturers had bought batches of bad capacitors and a lot of
motherboards starting to get returned.

So my advice is to check your server hardware for obvious signs of degradation.

Gerben.

At 15:25 1/5/2003 -0600, you wrote:
>I'm having a major problem with MailScanner (indirectly) and I am hoping
>that someone here may be able to help me with it.  It seems that when
>MailScanner (4.10) is running, the server tends to reboot.  However I
>don't believe that it is a problem with MailScanner.  I say this because
>the server is running on a RAID5 setup with a Mylex DAC960 controller
>with Barracuda SCSI drives.
>
>I suspect that the machine is rebooting due to the slowness of the RAID
>array.  I'm not exactly sure though, but I do feel that it is directly
>related.
>
>I'm currently running sendmail with spamass-milter with procmail to
>filter out and delete spam, but I would like to be able to filter
>viruses again.  I have tried disabling Virus Scanning and Spam Checks,
>with both disabled the machine still crashes.
>
>The crashes are random, sometimes the server will stay up and work
>correctly for a few days, sometimes it can't last an hour.  The machine
>its self is a quad Xeon 500MHz setup with a gig and a half of ram,
>running RedHat 8.0.  There is nothing in the log files to point anywhere
>since the machine is rebooting before it can write to syslog.
>
>Could anyone offer any insight on this problem?
>
>Regards,
>Bill Omer