Topic: Qmail problem

[Kevin M]

Hi

I have a 5.6 machine with all updates running. Was stable for about six months and still works fine as a server. Mail is a real problem. There are about 10 email accounts on the machine and intermittently over the last month or (with NO other changes on the machine) mail will fail to deliver (either from remote or local). I get a bounce message to the effect that someone@localhost doesn't exist and delivery fails. I can then send another email a minute later to the same address and it delivers fine.

I have now redirected all acounts to send/receive from my main (sendmail) server and the gateway is no longer used as a mail server and all is stable again.

Has anyone else seen this and hopefully have a fix. I have gone over logs, config, free disk space (>10GB), ram (256MB) etc etc and everything else I can and nothing appears to be a good reason for this problem.  

Regards
kevin

[Randall Perry]

Intermittent errors _usually_ point to hardware (because software can't automagically reconfigure itself to appear healed).

The easiest thing would be to check for possible hardware failure.
You could run diagnostics on it and see.
To beatup the memory, run the Linux memtest diskette or bootable CD for about 24 hours.

Because the account is there and then not, maybe you have
a harddrive that is failing.  For the hard drive, there should be a manufacturers utility set. (like Western Digital EZ drive).

Good Luck.

[Jens Kruuse]

For memory test, search for Charlie Brady's mem-test rpm. I believe it is found at contribs.org. I ran it for a week with no noticable effect on response time for http, smtp, etc.  

http://mirror.contribs.org/smeserver/contribs/cbharda/contrib/memtest/

Cheers,
Jens

[Kevin M]

It is possible it is a hardware error. It continues as a fileserver with out any hiccup. It has software raid and the raid checks ok. Never the less will check and see if this is indeed the problem.

Thanks for the comments.
Kevin

[Phil R]

Hi Kevin,
I am having a problem with email aswell, my servers have all of a sudden
refuse to redirect mail. So mail sent to joe@domain1 has been set up in the esmith manager to be redirected to joe@domain2, and it does not, infact it seems to disapear without a trace, without returning a bounce to the sender, I have looked at the mailog and everything reports fine. to me however I am not a Linux guru, Please some help would be really helpfull!!
Best Regards
Phil R