4.2 lost mail

[Cheshire Chuqui]

In article <53 at tove.UUCP> mark at tove.UUCP (Mark Weiser) writes:
>Sendmail checks the load average and queues up message for later
>delivery if the load is over some N (around 8 or so I think).
>This mode does not work--the messages are mostly lost for ever
>when the load goes over N.
>
>I find the presence of this bug to be amazing, considering all
>the sendmails that are out there.

I find the presence of this bug to be amazing also, considering that I've
never seen it on either of my vaxes. Both are running mostly standard 4.2
with no changes to sendmail (that I know of... :-). If you are losing stuff
into the mailqueue then the chances are that you don't have a sendmail
clearning the queue out on a regular basis in your /etc/rc. Ours looks like
this:

if [ -f /usr/lib/sendmail ]; then
	(cd /usr/spool/mqueue; rm -f lf*)
	/usr/lib/sendmail -bd -q30m & echo -n ' sendmail'	>/dev/console
fi

This will spawn a sendmail that sits sleeping in the background. It will
wake up every half an hour (-q30m) and flush out anything in the queue. It
IS a misfeature that once something goes into the sendmail queue this is
the only sendmail that will dequeue it (actually, typing '/usr/lib/sendmail
-q ' will, too, I believe if you have the proper priviledges) but it is
definitely a feature, not a bug.

You really don't want to set things up to always send mail-- I've seen a
780 go to its knees because of sendmail (a loadaverage of 7 went to a
loadaverage of about 25 because of 4 simultaneous sendmails to large
mailing lists). I DO wish that the people who wrote sendmail had decided
that any sendmail could flush out the queue if the loadaverage was
appropriate rather than having to set one up in /etc/rc.

chuq (sendmail is a hog, but a useful one...)

-- 
>From the center of a Plaid pentagram:		Chuq Von Rospach
{cbosgd,decwrl,fortune,hplabs,ihnp4,seismo}!nsc!chuqui  nsc!chuqui at decwrl.ARPA

  ~But you know, monsieur, that as long as she wears the claw of the dragon
  upon her breast you can do nothing-- her soul belongs to me!~