[theforum] only ~12 hours of downtime today!

Dean Mah dmah at shaw.ca
Tue Nov 7 07:31:48 CST 2006


Depending on your level of diligence, you can take advantage of the list
downtime to purge obvious e-mail messages from the queue, incoming and
outgoing.  Make sure everything is down and then you can use a script
like qmHandle to remove queued messages.  As well, removing e-mail
addresses that are obvious failures helps.  And if you are willing to
lose some messages, you can ignore the bounce backs from spoof'ed
evolt.org e-mail addresses.  As well, you can remove the mailman alias
that sends all unresolved local mail to the spam mailing list at the
risk of a false positive.

Dean


David Kaufman wrote:
> yippee.  or, more from the "glass-half-full" perspective:
> 
> 50% more uptime, on average, than the lists have had all week! :-)
> 
> I kicked the server Sunday afternoon, it appeared to have been down 
> since Saturday morning.  This after the downtime from Tuesday afternoon 
> till Friday night.  I'm not sure if other sysadmins are kicking it too 
> because the old kicks seem less and less effective, sometime the list 
> mail starts flowing again after 30 minutes or an hour, other times not.
> 
> I've added to my list of things to do when the lists are bogged down:
> 
>  - truncate the clamav logfile:
>    echo -n > /var/spool/qmailscan/qmail-queue.log
> 
>    (it was 70megs the other day, 19 megs just now)
> 
>  - purge the virus quarantine dir (was 35,000+ files in there...)
> 
> Legitimate list traffic is quite moderate.  It's the damned constant 
> deluge of crap which spamassassin must analyze and filter, and the 
> attached virii, which clamav must scan.
> 
> This is actually why I volunteered to take over for Dean when he dropped 
> from exhaustion.  I wanted mailserver combat chops on a high-volume 
> server with oodles of traffic, both legitimate and evil, so's I can sell 
> m'self as an smtp warrior (when the perl coder market dries up, as it 
> often it does).  So, I guess it's be-careful-what-you-wish-for time :-)
> 
> John and I are gonna put our collective noggins together Real Soon 
> Now... hopefully tonight, if we can sync schedules... and tackle this 
> problem and kick its butt.
> 
> You may expect to experience disruptions in service, time of 
> instability, general mayhem and blood flowing in the gutters.
> 
> But Keep the faith, evolutionaries!  Though the enemy is legion, and 
> we're armed only with the lowest-end Celeron money could er, rent ...in 
> 2003, our cause is Just and the open source Wizards are on our side :)
> 
> -dave (the lion-hearted) 
> 
> 
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> 
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> http://wiki.evolt.org/
> 
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