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- Path: sparky!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!news.acns.nwu.edu!network.ucsd.edu!mvb.saic.com!tgv.com!info-multinet
- Date: 29 JUL 92 22:57:47 GMT
- Newsgroups: vmsnet.networks.tcp-ip.multinet
- X-Return-path: <info-multinet-relay@TGV.COM>
- Subject: Possible Bug??
- X-RFC822-From: Harry Hopcroft <hopcroft@polar.bowdoin.edu>
- From: Harry Hopcroft <hopcroft@polar.bowdoin.edu>
- X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL0]
- Organization: The INFO-MULTINET Community
- Message-ID: <238052D629JUL92225747@TGV.COM>
- Nntp-Posting-Host: Mvb.Saic.Com
- Lines: 17
-
- We had an interesting occurrence this week in which the SMTP symbiont seemed
- to be running amok. It used up virtually all of the CPU time and was filling
- up the system disk. Examination showed that it was repeatedly trying to send
- an undeliverable mail message to the Postmaster. The Postmaster account was,
- however, missing. One reasonably might ask, of course, how THAT situation
- came about and I have no answer yet, but it did occur. When SMTP tried to
- return undeliverable mail to the postmaster, the effort generated an
- "undeliverable mail" error, so SMTP tried to send that to the postmaster,etc.
-
- Clearly the proximate cause of the problem here is the absence of the
- postmaster account, and the problem went away when we simply added such an
- account, but we wonder if maybe a trap couldn't be put into the code
- someplace that would abort such an infinite loop. Maybe the errant message
- could be sent to SYSTEM instead of postmaster if two "undeliverable" messages
- in a row are generated.
-
-