Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 13:46:20 -0500 (EST) From: "Crist J. Clark" <cjc@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG (FreeBSD Questions) Subject: inetd Error Message-ID: <199902221846.NAA19539@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com>
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I just had a really ugly problem with a mailserver at work. It's a little ol' PentiumPro with 24 MB RAM and 60 MB of swap. In hindsight, I should have given it more swap, but it never occured to me that POP and IMAP servers would be memory intensive. On to the problem, someone mailed a 40+ MB file to another user. This combined with the load of some other people eating memory with IMAP and large mailspools caused the recipient of the 40+ MB file's IMAP daemon to fill the swap to the top. I had the user quit from IMAP, and I removed the big mail item using elm as root. Now, I had assumed everything would be OK, but... Some bad behavior from both the inetd on the FreeBSD server, and Outlook POP and IMAP clients gave me headaches. The inetd process was returning a (this is from memory, I can't seem to find any logs of the exact message), Warning: inetd: realloc(): junk pointer too low inetd continued to return these after the swap problem had been fixed and even after a 'killall -HUP inetd.' Further, when Outlook catches this warning message, it gives up as if it was a fatal error (which it is not, Netscape clients worked fine). I ended up fixing the problem by killing inted completely and restarting it. Has anyone seen behavior like this from inetd before? I occasionally get those 'junk pointer' messages on several of my FreeBSD systems for a number of different applications, is that unusual? Is there a way to stop this? If this is reproducible, it seems like a DOS security hole. System info, # uname -a FreeBSD newmail.mydomain.org 2.2.7-RELEASE FreeBSD 2.2.7-RELEASE #1: Tue Dec 22 15:29:51 EST 1998 postman@newmail.mydomain.org:/usr/src/sys/compile/NEWMAIL i386 -- Crist J. Clark cjclark@home.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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