Topic: e-smith error messages

[Jim Darrough]

Hello.

     I have been running e-smith sme server and gateway with dungog's multiple pop utility for some time, and it has been a Godsend until recently. Now, the server is not getting the mail for me, and CRON is sending me messages that say 'removing stale lockfile' and then "segmentation fault'  with what looks like a dump of the fetchmail configuration.

     I am considering installation of sme server 5.5 but would like to know if there is some what to "fix" my problem. Can I just run e2fsck and try to recover bad sectors and/or corrupt files? I did "df" and the hd's are nowhere near full.

Thanks, Jim

[Darrell May]

What makes you think your hard drive is at fault or an upgrade to 5.5 will fix anything?  'segmentation fault' may point to a script/process failure.  You need to track done exactly what is failing.  Should be lot's of hints in /var/log/cron and /var/log/messages.

Darrell

[Jim Darrough]

Hi Darrel:

     I'll be happy to try to fix it. Let me give you some history first, though.

     I installed e-smith version 5.0 some time ago, and then tried to install the updates. I am on a dialup connection (28.8 on a GOOD day) and had some problems with timeouts on downloads. As such, I could never install the updates, and am now having other problems such as numerous (!!!) CRON messages alluding to removal of stale lockfiles. I use Stephen Noble's multi-pop utility, but now when I try to add or remove accounts and press the "save" button, I get an error message telling me to contact the system administrator with the error message. There ain't no error message.

     Anyway, the system is mounted on a K6-2/300 with 64m RAM and a 1.0 gig hard drive. I was thinking of installing it on a 9 gig scsi-2 hard drive with an Adaptec AHA-2940 PCI-based controller. That way I would get the latest [downloadable] SME server, plus a faster, more reliable drive. And, I can actually use the server as a file server as well. And if I can figure it out, a WINS server.

     Does that make more sense? I am willing to try to fix the problem providing you are willing to help me.

Sincerely,
              Jim Darrough

[Jim Darrough]

After Darrell's chastisement (just kidding, Darrell) I looked again at my logs. What I found was that I had been telling e-smith to send email that was not understood to "admin". I had never created an admin mail account, i.e.; I was not collecting mail sent to "admin" so it accumulated. In fact, I went into webmail on my server and discovered 6,514 messages.

It took me two hours to scan and delete these messages, and it appears that I am no longer having problems. Seems like fetchmail didn't want to handle that much email for one user!

Thanks to Darrell!

Jim Darrough