Hello Guys,

My SMTP is dieing once in every 24 hours and it is not even restarting even if I reboot the server.

Any idea why is that happening. Below is the message I get on my admin email.



The SMTP (mail) server appears to be down. The mail server may shut itself
down temporarily under extreme load, so you should also check the CPU load
on the server. If the load does not appear to be the problem, try turning
mail service off and then on within the Cobalt server Control Panel to see if
this corrects the problem. If not, try rebooting the server itself. If this
still does not correct the problem, contact Cobalt Technical Support.


TIA

Salam,
-Omair

some one is spamming using your server causing the mailer to overload, inturn causing the raq to shut it down... monitor your accounts for spamming.. and check your mail logs..

How do I check out the logs and which logs do I have to check out?

How do I restart the SMTP server for now?


Salam,
-Omair

do the following :

1. check your queue

/usr/lib/sendmail -bp

2. if queue is big, remove everything from your queue

goto /var/spool/mqueue
and type rm *


this should delete all the out going emails..

3. restart sendmail..
/etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail restart


thats about it :)

Omair,

I did a quick check and people can't relay through your server. If it is spamming, then it's coming from someone who has an account on your server.

Frank

Hello ffeingol and Kunal,

I was going through all the emails in the /var/spool/mqueue and found that the emails were coming from a website, I have suspended that website for the moment.

Secondly, thanks all for helping and replying. I have the SMTP server now online and also I have deleted all the message the client was trying to send.



-Omair

The raq will automatically shut down the smtp server if the server load (cpu load average) is very high. It more or less says "Oh My God - I need to shut down some processes here to prevent myself from dying". It sends the admin a mail and ****s it down.

You need to monitor your server load. Either high traffic or badly written PHP/CGI scripts are causing this.

I had the same problem once when a virtual site had a script with an infinite loop!