Please flame me quick for posting to the wrong list then tell me where this should be posted. Thanks.
I setup postfix/saslauthd/pam.d->mysql (for auth) and parallel postfix->mysql (for virtual, users, aliases, etc.) a couple of months ago on my athlon and it ran fine (after getting it setup) for about a month. Some three weeks ago I setup my old ss20 as my firewall/email/dns/etc. box and moved the email tool stack over to it. It's worked so-so for past few weeks with the biggest headache being the 10 second openssl TLS setup. Last night (5:30 am?) postfix stopped being able to access mysql via 127.0.0.1 in it's cf files. Result was that emails backed up and, at its worst, smtpd was holding onto over 3,600 (three thousand six hundred) file descriptors. cleanup was almost as bad, with over two thousand file descriptors. My 2.2.25 linux choked until I opened up file-max and inode-max in /proc. (It was after opening up the file/inode-max that the above 3,600 and 2,000+ files open data points were picked up). I've been crawling through the logs for an hour+, along with 'lsof | grep smtpd | wc' type commands, etc. to sort this out. I fixed by changing the /etc/postfix/mysql*.cf files hosts parameter from 127.0.0.1 over to 'localhost'. Bingo, everything works again. Note that I had been restarting the whole email tool stack repeatedly without the problem going away (and checking that all processes were flushed with ps-aef along the way). While that simple change from '127.0.0.1' to 'localhost' and a 'postfix restart/reload' fixed. Does anyone have any idea what might have blown? This is the third time the system choked this way, though the first time I've crawled through the logs and debugged. The other two times I fixed by rebooting the os. I cannot promise that the other two times file handles weren't released and linux choked were related to smtpd/postfix/mysql. Another data point ... 'ifconfig' showed lo and 127.0.0.1 being up. I checked that as soon as I realized postfix/smtpd wasn't getting into mysql via '-h 127.0.0.1' Okay, now flame me for posting to the wrong list and quick advise me where to post. I just really don't know what blew up on this sparc box and hadn't had this experience on the athlon, though the athlon is running 2.4.22-ac3, both are on 'unstable' so there's the steady thrash of packages, and I've been trying to push key packages over to -mv8 packages on the sparc box to get the integer math speedup for some python/openssl/whatever packages. Thanks Heitzso
