Lock up problems fixed??? not sure...

Matt Juszczak matt at atopia.net
Fri Jul 1 22:19:04 GMT 2005


Hi all,

Well, after removing IPF and having a week of stability, we decided to put 
our mail server to the test.

I began flooding it with tons of mail messages using smtp-source at about 
2 pm today.  The server load jumped up to about 4.50 average.  It 
eventually started denying requests, but after waiting a few minutes, it 
would accept them again (I was literally flooding it, I sent in all 1.2 
million emails).

I wrote a scipt to hammer it, so even after it would refuse the 
connection, it would hammer it again.  Eventually, the machine started to 
not respond.  I could ping it with successful replies, but could not SSH 
into it.  The last message on the screen was "Could not write to 
/var/mail/thissucks", which was the account we were testing.

I rebooted the machine, and all is fine.  I'm not sure if this is still a 
sign of instability, or if this is a "Any idiot who would sent 1.2 million 
emails and a full flood for hours to a mail server should expect something 
like this to happen" message.

Any input?

Thanks!

-Matt


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