No SYSLOG No Mail Scanned

[Glenn Steen]

On 06/04/06, Res <res at ausics.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 5 Apr 2006, Glenn Steen wrote:
> >>
> >> That is silly, i dont give a toss about syslog running or not, at 100
> >
> > Exactly.
> >
> >> megs a day I sure as hell have better things to do then look at logs lol,
> >> but coz syslog dies, why the hell should mail cease to be processed because
> >> of it.
> >
> > Why not? It got your attention;-):-).
>
> No, it got my customers attention :P  yahoo have facination of sending to
> sec MX only around here and a lot of whingers|crybabies were not getting
> their yahoo groups spam, thats how we originally found it, somethign amiss
> with 300 sendmail copies running and a number  of mailscanner <defunts> :)
>
See your point... Might be nasty:-).

> > Syslog is pretty stable usually, so something making it die would (in
> > my experience) be an indication that you have a "serious" problem.
>
> yeah, it did it a few times since this post as well, the problem appeared
> that our scsi drive mounted for swap was flakey, swap was non existent,
> then it was there, I thought  id had a few too many bourbons, no out
> ofordinary messages anywhere, replaced it and it hasnt died yet (almost 18
> hours) I think thats whats caused it, there seems to be no other issues

.... Ah. Never seen that exact behaviour (with or without whiskey:),
but then a flakey HDD would (in my case) be killing filesystems too,
so that would probably get my attention:-).
And all the while dmesg was silent? Spooky...

> > I'm sure it's acceptable to you to not keep very good track of
> > individual messages, nor of errors etc... But to some (like me) it
>
> bloody oath, not at the rate it turns over, and thats not counting the
> fact sendmail rejects 80% more mail for RBL/no dns records etc :)
>
I definitely see your point... I'm at a .gov-ish site here, and have
regulations in place that make logging almost as paramount as the
actual messages ("availability to the public" type of thing), So I
don't have the "luxury" of not logging everything. Sigh.
>
> It also pleased me to see it clear out all the 2 days of mail it kept in a
> small time frame with no real killing of the machine load wise, in fact
> procesing new mail and doing the stored stuff as well and the load was
> still less than our primary servers which can not run mailscanner because
> they are all qmail (and qmailscan), and before you ask, no we cant change,
> as a wholesaler to over a hundred VISPs and thousands and thousands
> of hosting domains, qmail/vpopmail combo is far superior to anything for
> this tyupe of operation (and thats from a staunch sendmail supporter :P )
> Kinda why al lthe stand alones run sendmail :)
> >

Ah yes, don't we just love MailScanner for it! (I suppose mentioning
postfix here is tantamount to swearing, so...:-)
Anyway, glad to hear you have it sorted. Sounds like you've earned
yourself some more bourbon;-)

Cheers
--
-- Glenn
email: glenn < dot > steen < at > gmail < dot > com
work: glenn < dot > steen < at > ap1 < dot > se