At 04:48 PM 3.22.2004 -0600, David B Funk wrote: >On Mon, 22 Mar 2004, Paolo Cravero as2594 wrote: > >> Hi. >> An exceptionally high load of incoming messages has managed to crash >> spamd (Postfix + SpamAssassin 2.62 on a dual Xeon 2G4). >> >> Is there a crontab script that monitors spamd health and in case >> attempts a restart and/or warns a sysadmin? >> >> For those interested, Murphy made this happen on Friday night so >> until Monday morning half of incoming mail was not spam-filtered (we're >> running under load balancing). They were about 2500 msg/h (41 msg/min) >> incoming generated by a vacation-reply loop (vacation reply to an >> unknown mailbox, bounce, vacation reply to bounce, etc etc). > >I can't help you with the stay-alive script, but have another >type of suggestion. Check your Postfix to see if it has some kind >of rate/load limiting feature. (IE configure it to deny or queue-only >if the incoming connections get above a certain rate, or if the >load/resource usage gets to high). >We use sendmail and I've got it configured with rate limit thresholds >to defend spamd from mail-bomb attacks (externally or internally >generated ;). >Reasonable rate limiting has totally cured our SA from overload deaths. > >One other trick to survive forward-loops or reply-ping-pongs, configure >your system so that if you've SA filtered a given message once, skip >it if you see it again. (IE if it already has a SA header added by >your system, don't bother to filter it again). > >-- >Dave Funk University of Iowa >
Dave is right about using all possible the Sendmail-type tweaks to control & ease the overloads. I had exactly the same problem as you did, but with Spamass-milter which choked (for the first time) on one of the recent floods in the wee hours of the morning. It was only down for about 2 hours, but hundreds of spam slipped through to jar my users. I have a script that will work, but I decided to install /ports/sysutils/damontools instead and have found it to be excellent for this. It claims that it will monitor and restart as many as a 1000 daemons. It checks the status of a daemon every 5 seconds. I've had the Spamass-milter go down once again and the daemontool did its job well with immediate restart. Hope this helps. Best regards, Jack L. Stone, Administrator Sage American http://www.sage-american.com [EMAIL PROTECTED]
