Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2002 10:23:29 +0100 From: Matthew Seaman <m.seaman@infracaninophile.co.uk> To: Joni S <jonisetiawan@hotpop.com> Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Fw: Mail spool file Message-ID: <20020913092329.GB60602@happy-idiot-talk.infracaninophi> In-Reply-To: <00dd01c25aca$f77cf390$6c00a8c0@benny> References: <00dd01c25aca$f77cf390$6c00a8c0@benny>
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On Fri, Sep 13, 2002 at 09:12:04AM +0700, Joni S wrote:
> I use Sendmail 8.9.3 with FreeBSD 3.3R on my email server running on
> COMPAQ ProLiant 1600R (RAID 5 configured). Recently I had a problem
> with my mail spool file. Many of my user's spool file are huge file
> (400 to 800 MB).
That's what --- 3 years old now? (3.3R was released in September
1999). Pretty elderly in computer terms.
> Once the users retrieve the email using Qpopper in the server, they
> got so many garbage inside their inbox. The garbage mail contain
> some text that might be FreeBSD system, binary, log, or script file.
> Immediately I checked mail spool files, and..... , yes, they contain
> garbage message. I stopped SMTP and POP3 daemon, and I run fsck 10
> times until it reported no more errors. Then I copied all those mail
> spool files to other directory. But, when I compared the original
> mail spool file with the one that I copied, it was not identical.
That sounds like a problem with your RAID system --- it seems to be
randomly substituting filesystem blocks for the correct ones. This
could be due to a bit error somewhere in the hardware. If you have
any raid management software that came with your system, it would be a
good idea to fire it up and see if it can diagnose problems with the
hardware.
One other point: there's not a lot of use running fsck against a
mounted filesystem. You'll end up with fsck fighting against the
kernel both trying to make changes to the same data. Unmount the file
system before running fsck, and preferably drop to single user mode
first.
> My questions are:
> 1. Why that many of the big spool files could contain garbage?
> 2. Why that the copy process did not resulted in two identical file?
You're seeing the effect in the mail spool files because they are
probably the most active files on the system. If you check some other
files that get quite a lot of write activity you might find similar
corruption: something like the system log files /var/log/messages
would be prime suspects.
The copy process not producing identical results is just another
symptom of the same trouble. With a hardware problem of the sort I
suspect, you can't trust any of the files on the system to be returned
containing the correct data. Time to call the support line and get an
engineer in.
Cheers,
Matthew
--
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 26 The Paddocks
Savill Way
Marlow
Tel: +44 1628 476614 Bucks., SL7 1TH UK
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