maillog ..issue.

[samirm]

Hi Gurus,

I am very new to Linux environment. The Linux server which we have at present is acting as a sendmail server of the Organization.

While doing "uname -a " its saying :-

Linux mail.abc.com 2.6.9-5.ELsmp #1 SMP Wed Jan 5 19:30:39 EST 2005 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

The problem which I am facing now is with mailog file. Yesterday mails were not coming to Inbox, and while finding the root cause, we found the /var file system was full. There was one huge file maillog created and made this mess.

It was never happened before. Under /var/log directory there are the files :-

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Dec 14 09:08 maillog
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Dec 14 17:02 maillog.1
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Dec 14 09:09 maillog.2
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Dec 14 16:45 maillog.3
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Dec 14 16:44 maillog.4

I made all the files 0 byte to reduce the space. Now I can see the maillog file is not getting generated and I don't know whether that log file will switch to maillog.1, maillog.2 and so on ..!!

How can I confirm, my machine is fine and do I need to do any thing just to make sure ..my sendmail server is working fine.

A quick reply on this issue will be highly appreciated.

Thanks for all your support.

Sam

 

[smah]

The numbered versions should be rotated logs from the past. See man logrotate for more info. You'll probably need to stop & restart sendmail to get it logging properly.

 

[samirm]

Thanks smah for this update.

At present there is no maillog file getting generated.

These are the sendmail files I found in my Linux system ..

/etc/sysconfig/sendmail
/etc/log.d/scripts/services/sendmail
/etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail


# ./sendmail stop
# ./sendmail start

Which one is the rigt one to stop - start this ?
Any idea ?

Sam

 

[smah]

/etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail stop
then
/etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail start

Make sure that you check out your logrotate settings to prevent this from happening again. I should have been more clear earlier - maillog should be the current log file, all the other (numbered) ones should be previous logs that have been rotated with logrotate. Since at this point they don't contain anything, you might as well delete them all while sendmail is stopped.

 

[samirm]

Thanks smah ...
But while stopping the sendmail ..
its showing OK ..
But when I am doing ./sendmail status
Its still showing running ...
Anway ..i was waiting for couple of minutes ..and did ./sendmail start to start the sendmail.
Its showing OK again ..
But i don't know ..it did anything ...
The maillog file is still looking 0 bytes.

Sam