From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Apr 25 3:21:51 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from freebsd1.firestorm2000.com (freebsd1.firestorm2000.com [204.141.99.101]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 84D3037B67F for ; Tue, 25 Apr 2000 03:21:48 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from danm@firestorm2000.com) Received: from localhost (danm@localhost) by freebsd1.firestorm2000.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id GAA64964; Tue, 25 Apr 2000 06:28:13 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from danm@firestorm2000.com) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 06:28:13 -0400 (EDT) From: "Daniel Mahoney, Systems Admin" To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Sendmail Processes Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hi, I'm having a problem with sendmail, and I've seen this discussed on the list before... Sendmail likes to start a whole bunch of processes with the same IP (I assume this might be because of a spammer of some sort), as it mostly comes from dialup IPs, and users who have no real reason to be relaying mail through our system. However, the processes stack up (and today, ate 200 megs of swap on me). The only solution I can find to this is a killall sendmail, and then restart it manually. I've read the solutions proposed by setting maxdaemonchild, and also in setting a connection throttle rate...Except that these sendmail processes are far too many, and have been going on for the better part of all night, so setting those variables would only shut my system down for mail anyway. For the record, I cannot even ping the IPs in question. What WOULD help is if sendmail had an option that could limit the number of connections from a specific host to some reasonable number. If anyone could tell me (A) What happens in the "startup phase" (a search of sendmail.org proved fruitless), or (B) how to limit and/or control these processes it would be appreciated, as right now it's requiring a constant eye. Here's those processes: 61961 ?? S 0:00.14 sendmail: startup with h24-66-7-213.mt.wave.shaw.ca (sendma 61986 ?? S 0:00.14 sendmail: startup with h24-66-7-213.mt.wave.shaw.ca (sendma 62370 ?? S 0:00.11 sendmail: startup with h24-66-7-213.mt.wave.shaw.ca (sendma 62618 ?? S 0:00.12 sendmail: startup with h24-66-7-213.mt.wave.shaw.ca (sendma 62644 ?? S 0:00.08 sendmail: startup with h24-66-7-213.mt.wave.shaw.ca (sendma 62691 ?? S 0:00.08 sendmail: startup with h24-66-7-213.mt.wave.shaw.ca (sendma 62771 ?? S 0:00.07 sendmail: startup with h24-66-7-213.mt.wave.shaw.ca (sendma 62899 ?? S 0:00.06 sendmail: startup with h24-66-7-213.mt.wave.shaw.ca (sendma 62951 ?? S 0:00.05 sendmail: startup with h24-66-7-213.mt.wave.shaw.ca (sendma 63369 ?? S 0:00.02 sendmail: startup with h24-66-7-213.mt.wave.shaw.ca (sendma 63439 ?? S 0:00.01 sendmail: startup with h24-66-7-213.mt.wave.shaw.ca (sendma Please send an email reply, as I'm not on the list. Thanks, Dan Mahoney To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message