problems with BLU mail?

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

Jerry Feldman wrote:
> It appears to be a combination of things. 
> 1. The mailman qrunner tends to get hung up every once in a while. My 
> solution to this in October was to set up an hourly mailman cron to 
> restart the qrunners. However I turned that off on Wednesday, but the 
> problem came back. Last night I had 386 messages on the mailman queue, 
> this morning it is down to 85. 

Jerry, first of all, thank you so much for doing all this work and research.

Maybe we need to set up some lightweight watchdog programs to look for
things like too many emails in the queue.  If they can't fix the
problem, at least they can send alert emails.

> 2. The combination of incoming SPAM traffic, SPAMassasin, and mailscanner 
> seem to have postfix taking too long to read mail. 

We could use one of the tools we've been talking about the past few days
to block at the firewall layer for IP addresses attempting to relay
emails or send to non-existent users.  That should eliminate a lot of it.

> 3. There are a number of bad addresses on our listserv resulting from the 
> restoration of some lists. This also slows down the system, but these are 
> quickly getting purged as postfix decides to bounce them or I manually 
> remove them. 

Doesn't mailman automatic bounce processing deal with that?  After N
bounces they get removed automatically?

> 4. I'm also seeing some issues with the hourly cron job that JABR set up 
> for the virus updates. 
> 
> The best solution would be to stop SPAM on the Internet :-)

I'll get right on that!

> More of a stopgap solution for us would be to acquire a new system. I'd 
> love to have something like an HP ProLiant DL380G4 or G5. Jokingly I 
> mentioned that to one of the lists and they are now passing the hat. A 
> more realistic approach is to utilize an existing low-end server that JABR 
> bought via eBay as a dedicated mail server. I'm also checking with some 
> contacts to see if I can obtain a donated system. Ideally, if we get a 
> decent system, we would like to run virtualization.

We only have a half-rack, right?  Can we really fit the 4 servers we've
been talking about in a half rack?

I have a few old (possibly incomplete) Sun rack-mounts and a larger old
Intel rack mount BLU is welcome to, if only for the cases and power
supplies.  I'll send more details next year if you're interested.

I assume we wouldn't be paying for a support contract, so why not build
the servers ourselves instead of paying for a name?


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