On Fri, 17 Feb 2006, Jorn Hass wrote: > First of, a huge wave to David L. for a great piece of software... > Secondly a big wave to the rest on this list... > > (For the record, I'm in sunny (Currently) Johannesburg, South > Africa... [We have been tormented with torrential rains in the last > month or so...]) > > I am new to this list, so please bear with me if this has all been > done and said... > > I came across a serious problem with re-entrance on FreeBSD 5.4, and > found various references to the issue. Basically XMail server would > keep "freezing" with an error logged to the syslog in the form of: > Feb 14 20:43:22 mailbox XMail[46411]: Unable to create file > > This would mostly happen after a flood of spamming attempts, or someone > hammering the server with POP requests... (Like 5-7 requests/second for > the next week...) > > Restarting XMail nightly worked for the most part, but that was > treating the symptom, not the problem... > > This is after successfully running it on FreeBSD 4.5 for a long time... > > As this was one of my "pet projects", I didn't have much time sniffing > and searching for clues, so it took me a while... Hence the nightly > reboot... > > The only reference to the "unable to open file" error, on the > xmailserver site, only appears in the SMTP Error messages under -19, > which didn't tell me much... > > So I went digging and found a reference to KQUEUE entries not being > released. > > So the direct reference I found, said, remove "-lr_c" from MakeFile, > and the problem would be resolved... > Did that, and had a violent crash with coredump... :( > > So I checked some more, and there where references to SMP kernels and > re-entrant issues. This seems to be in effect with any 5.x kernel. I > then figured out how to do it... > > So a quick rundown on check/solution: > Install lsof for FreeBSD > run "lsof | grep XMail | grep KQUEUE". If these keep increasing, > particularly after a POP mailcheck, without decreasing, your system > suffers from this problem... > > Patch the kernel as given at: > http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=threads/75795 > Rebuild kernel and reboot. > > Now it won't have the problem anymore, and I can see the KQUEUEs popping > in and out on my box... > > I have not found a direct thread on this particular problem, and the > kernel patches are still not in the latest release (5.4rc11), so I > think there might be more people with this issue, and hopefully this > bit might help them... > > I have rebooted with the new kernel this morning, and hopefully I > should have peace and quiet overnight... I will report more on this, > should I notice any more issues... > > David: Could you possibly add this to the server doc/homepage somewhere?
The mailing list archive *is* a doc, and you just made an entry into it ;) - Davide - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe xmail" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For general help: send the line "help" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
