Timeouts on incoming mail

[geekgerl]

Hello,

All of our customer email passes through a virusscan server before being forwarded on to our qmail server (where their email accounts reside).

Yesterday we took our qmail server offline for an hour due to hardware issues, and now it's back up. Ever since we brought it back up our virus server keeps reporting timeouts when attempting to relay mail to the qmail server. Some emails are getting through, while others are getting delayed. The virusscan server logs keep reporting "Remote host has closed the connection" or "Protocol timeout".

I checked the qmail logs, but I'm unable to find similar messages. Also, it's strange that some messages are getting through while others are not. Am I looking in the wrong place? Is there some kind of thresholding that could be taking place? We're not using any kind of special qmail patches (like tarpittng) to limit the connections.

Thanks in advance for any help!

-Laura

 

[thedaver]

Laura;

It sounds like either:

1) You have some sort of contention on port 25 (or whatever port your gateway is using). This would not be unexpected on reboot since you may have left sendmail/exim/etc. left "on" in your distro's configuration by accident and now that is trying to listed (perhaps via inetd/xinetd?) along with tcpserver/qmail-smtpd
2) You have somehow set your memory per-instance lower in your qmail-smtpd/run file which is leading to the daemon exhausting memory and crashing. Your symptom of "some email getting delivered" is often seen with messages of various sizes hitting a memory constrained daemon configuration. This is pretty well documented on the net.


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