Topic: QMAIL alert: oh no! lost spawn connection! dying...

[Tom Carroll]

I now have this problem too on SME 5.1.2-U1.

I read the threads at http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=2826.msg9587#msg9587 and did not see a remedy.  I thought I would pickup a new thread in this forum in hopes someone may know what is going on and a fix.

I noticed I had not received any e-mail since Saturday. I can receive e-mail from my running daemons, but when something externally comes into the mail server, it does not get delivered to the local users mail queue. It does not show any errors in the mail log, messages, or in the qmail log file, other than the following error:

"@400000003cdfe24e23cd90c4 alert: oh no! lost spawn connection! dying...
@400000003cdfe24e23cdb3ec alert: oh no! lost spawn connection! dying...
@400000003cdfe24e23cdb7d4 status: exiting
@400000003cdfe3a62c30e39c status: local 0/10 remote 0/20

Anyone know what is causing this and how to fix it?

I had installed the development tools just before that because I was working with the early_bird stuff, but have since removed those packages.

Tom Carroll
Dataware Computers

[Nathan Fowler]

I got and looked over the source code to qmail-send.c, it appears that you may be out of swap memory or file descriptors.  The problem happens when there is a failure to do an ndelay setting on a file descriptor.  Would your startup script have a different ulimit than a default box?  Check your swap space and free memory

free -m
df -h

I'd like to see your values....also, could it be possible you have 40+ concurrent session at once?  Have you monkied with your qmail configuration at all?

Nathan

[Nathan Fowler]

Also, paste me the contents of your:

/var/qmail/control/virtualdomains
/var/qmail/control/locals
/var/qmail/control/defaulthost

Nathan

[John]

I've had exactly same error message - I've restared all of the mail related services and worked. But would be nice to know the meaning of this error message.

Regards,
John