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

[Tim Jabaut]

Here is a snipet of the qmail log file. I just install SME server v5 last week and all was well for about 4 days. Then out of the blue I stopped receiving mail. Upon futher inspection I found this error and do not know what it means.

View Log File: qmail/current
Viewed at Sun Nov 11 13:38:09 2001
@400000003be702dd1350e494 status: local 0/10 remote 0/20
@400000003be706be39c7214c alert: oh no! lost spawn connection! dying...
@400000003be706be39c7967c alert: oh no! lost spawn connection! dying...
@400000003be706be39c7c944 status: exiting
@400000003be7075e0003b344 status: local 0/10 remote 0/20
@400000003be70c800fa85e94 new msg 442336

I would really appreciate any help that can be provided as I am currently without a mail server. I am having to wildcard forward anything comin into my domain to a third party service.

Tim Jabaut

[guestFF]

Did you install update 2.....?

[Tim Jabaut]

Yes I have applied Update 2.

Is there a way or any need, as in Windoze NT/2000, to reapply the service packs. I am wondering if something got overwritten, corrupt, etc.

The blades section does not allow you to uninstall or reinstall an upgrade.

[guestFF]

As far as I know, no need to re-apply any blade or update. They are perminent.

The alert messages with 'oh no !'  are the trouble. The rest is ok.

Did a bit of a search in http://www.qmail.org but I did not see a similar error message yet...


HFW

[guestFF]

btw,

This document is advisable to read. (I know it's a lot, but I will try too.... )

http://www.lifewithqmail.org/

Not just you Tim, but it's the first clear dicument about qmail that I saw.

HFW

[Peter Walter]

Tim,

I have a very similar problem with the same message. Did you ever figure out what was wrong with the qmail setup?

Thanks,

Peter Walter

[John Mbaka]

I also havev similar error message and can't recieve any email. Has anyone any idea how to solve this problem. Your assistance will be highly be appreciated.

[Peter Walter]

John,

I do not know if the following had anything to do with the problem, but, after I selected the "Hostnames & Addresses" panel, and changed the visibility of the mail, www, & ftp hostnames to "Global", my problems disappeared.

Peter

[Tom Carroll]

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

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 figure out what is causing this and how to fix it?

Tom Carroll
Dataware Computers

[Dan G.]

I had a few instances of this early in my upgrade for 4.1.2 to 5.x, but it "went away," and hasn't come back.  I also noted it on a client system after a fresh install of 5.1.2, but again it was a transient occurrence.  There is almost no good information to be found by Googling that error message, and all the dialog here on it is inconclusive.  I'd like to see an answer too

[Gordon]

Has anyone found the cause of these messages? Or a means to translate them?
I have a 5.1.2 that can recieve but not send and the lost spawn message is the only clue I have found to date.
Gordon

[Gordon]

Found the answer to my problem. It may not be applicable for others but just in case.
I had when on dialup service prior to changing to ADSL installed mitel-qmailconcurrencyremote-1.0-1 package which appears to have been waiting for a diald signal before flushing the queue.
Gordon

[Barry Rogers]

Hello all,
I have looked everywhere to find a solution to this problem, which we also suddenly started to suffer from!
I tried all the start/stop/restart ie. 'service qmail start'. qmail started OK, but still nothing. 'service qmail status' resulted in showing qmail was up, but worryingly it said 'normally down'... I even flushed the qmail-queue, nothing. I tried to start smtpfwdd, but I could not find it (yeah I know, dummy...)
I scanned our server and found Port 25-SMTP was blocked, when it was open when we were receiving email...
All looked OK, except it was not and we were getting the error message in the logs.
In a last ditch effort, I upgraded 5.1.2 with Update 3. I felt this would rewrite some corrupt qmail file somewhere which was possibly the cause of this.
Well, the email has started working again and we are not getting the error message anymore.
It seems to me that there is a corrupt file somewhere, which is causing qmail not to start properly, hence possibly the message. I do not know the exact cause of this, and from what I have seen on the many Web sites I looked at, neither does anybody else! Even Mitel appear to have no idea too, judging by the many posts and the small amount of help from the usually attendant people at Mitel.
I was wondering if re-applying the qmail RPM (if there is such a thing), would do the same job of re-writing the corrupt file/s? I do not know how to do this, but some other people could try this maybe?
My suggestion is to try everything! Sorry I could not be of any definitive help.