Thanks to the rapid replies of the following:
"Charles M. Richmond" - suggest I look for mail loops.
"Phil VanHelden" - asked for any solutions I received
"PRE Site Manager" - " " " " " "
"Tom Rioux" - provided a Perl script to control the symptom
but doesn't provide a cure
I waited a while but no further responses came in after the initial
flurry (in a manner consistent with this list, these replies were
generated within two hours of the original post!), so here's an interim
summary. Regarding the possibility of mail loops, I'd initially
checked for this and the non-existance of a .forward or .maildelivery
file for the user in question, plus nothing unusual in the mail logs
and daemon logs, seems to have ruled that out. The inetd doesn't seem
to really be the problem in and of itself as it was restarted last
night to no effect (although at the time I thought this had fixed
things). The Perl script graciously provided attempts to control a
"bug" in something called "dtfile" which was misbehaving. I could find
no reference to "dtfile" (or the "dtpad" and "dtmail" also referred to
therein) in our system docs, nor any such processes, and so the script
is not terribly usefuli by itself. It *does* trim excess comsats as
well, but this is not really a solution to the problem of what
generates the (excess) comsats in the first place.
I had cause to reboot our Alpha this morning ("opportunity" might be a
better word) and everything is now fine. This is unfortunate in one
sense, as nothing was learned per se. But at least rebooting seems to
work (while extreme).
If I receive any further recommendations or suggestions, I'll
post them here in another summary.
Cheers
Chris
======================================================
Christopher C Stevenson C3004 (709) 737-2624
Dept. of Physics & Physical Oceanography
Memorial University of Newfoundland
St. John's, Newfoundland, CANADA A1B 3X7
URL:
http://www.physics.mun.ca/~csteven
Received on Wed May 29 1996 - 20:43:28 NZST