- Mate Wierdl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
| Can you give an example for a blackhole? (Like how a user's .qmail
| can get stuck?)
There is of course the deliberate attempt:
|sleep 86400
But what has bitten here a couple of times is an alias set up to
receive mail from some popular mailing lists and inject them into
local newsgroups. If the news server is down, the script detects this
fact and stashes the message away in a directory to be posted later.
But sometimes, in particular when the news spool is full, the news
server has been accepting connections, then not responding. Since the
script has no timeout mechanism of its own, the result is a stuck
qmail-local. (Since then, I have managed to bully the owner of these
scripts into dealing with the situation more intelligently. So this
particular problem does not occur anymore.)
Another one that bit us is a user trying to deliver mail across NFS
when the NFS server was down. We go to great lengths to avoid this
sort of thing, always forwarding the mail to the machine hosting the
user's home directory. But *this* user has more disk space on a
different server than his home one...
- Harald
