How to monitor the health of the MailScanner architecture

[Jonas A. Larsen]

Hello all

 

I have a problem, and discussing it on the irc channel didn’t turn up any
obvious solution.

 

Say you have more than 1 MS box scanning mails for a specific domain. They
are load balanced in some way, so the load is split over the servers.

 

Now lets say one of the servers have a problem. Not a fatal problem, so the
server is still running (responds to pings etc) port 25 is still open, and
exim (the mta in my case) still accepts mails.

 

But for some reason, crash, corrupt config, full root fs etc. the process of
moving mails from the incoming queue to the outgoing queue is not working.

 

What I am interested in, is a system to alert me of such a problem
automatically.

 

Currently the only thing, besides clients noticing mail being delayed, is
for me to look at my mailscaner-mrtg graphs for the incoming queue and
notice that its growing.

 

One method of doing all this automatically that we came up with, would be
some complex system that would work as follows:

 

You create a domain for each MailScanner, that only that MailScanner scans
for.

 

You then create an imap account on another system for each of the domains.

 

You then create a script that sends a mail to each of the accounts and after
X amount of minutes check to see if the mail has arrived on the imap
account. If yes, delete the mail and do the same thing again after Y amount
of minutes (a cron job), if it doesn’t exist something must be wrong with
the mailflow, either its interrupted or is experiencing delays.

 

Do anybody have a better idea or know of something that can do this already?

 

My root file system ran full last week, and it caused mails to still be
accepted (incoming is on /var on another disk) but MS was frozen because it
couldn’t extract attachments to /tmp which was full because it was on the
same disk as the root fs.

 

I hope I have made the above somewhat clear, if not please ask me to
clarify.

 

 

Med venlig hilsen / Best regards

 

Jonas Akrouh Larsen

 

TechBiz ApS

Laplandsgade 4, 2. sal

2300 København S

 

Office: 7020 0979

Direct: 33369974

Fax:    7020 0978

Mobile: 51201096

Web:  <http://www.techbiz.dk/> www.techbiz.dk

 

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