MailScanner taking tons of cpu/mem and halting my server

[James Gray]

Steve Thomas wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 23, 2004 at 04:34:51PM +0000, Martin Hepworth is rumored to have said:
>
>>Ok daft question, but how can 2 drives be in a raid 5 config????
>
>
> I was wondering that myself.
>
>
> --
> "It is much more comfortable to be mad and know it, than to be sane and have one's doubts."
> - G. B. Burgin

I once inherited a Solaris system that was configured with 2 drives in a
RAID5 with one hot spare.  How did the space cadet who configured the
server accomplish this feat you ask?

Well, they simply partitioned each drive into two slices.  Voila! Four
separate partitions and DiskSuite[1] was happy: 3 slices into RAID5, the
4th becoming the "hot spare".  (Technical bit: The metastat databases
were on different drives)  When I went to manglement to ask them for
some $$$ to buy another drive and fix the problem, the response was "but
$PREVIOUS_ADMIN said this was fully redundant!".

So I just backed everything up and turned it into a RAID-0 with no hot
spare.  Some people should not be allowed NEAR computers :P

--James
[1] Solaris software RAID system.