Hi all!
My original question had to do with why I might be seeing runaway mail
processes and what, if anything, I can do about them. Early suggestions
were to upgrade my version of Unix, but I am inhibited both by the software
on the boxes and the time of year (no upgrades while the students are
here). I have not tried either of the suggestions below, but once the
students are gone, we are probably going to upgrade, and install sendmail
8.8.8. By all accounts, it appears to be a better product than the Digital
sendmail.
We may give the CPU limit option a try first (perhaps over Spring Break!)
Many thanks to the following, whose full-text suggestions are below:
Jerome M Berkman
Martin Mokrejs
Also thanks to Dave Courtade, who mentioned it might be a security issue,
and one of my colleagues from the educational database world, Donn Aiken,
who conferred with me on database specific issues.
Sheryl
================================
We had similar problems long ago on Ultrix. Our solution was to
put:
limit cpu 300
in the initialization script sourced on logging in. For Digital
UNIX, if using the C shell, put it in /etc/login.csh which is
sourced before the user's .cshrc and .login. Since we did that,
we no longer have runaway processes, pine, tin, etc. (Sometimes
emacs users generate infitinte loops; it may reset this).
Of course our Ultix and Alphas are email servers, so users are
not supposed to run anything long. But the group managing the
general purpose UNIX system has followed suit, putting that in
their /etc/login (the Solaris equiv.).
Any user can override this by putting "unlimit cpu" or "limit cpu xxx"
in their .login file.
- Jerry
===================================
Tro to install sendmail-8.8.8. In it's config file is a chnce to limit
number of sendmail processes. There's also option:
# load average at which we just queue messages
O QueueLA=10
# load average at which we refuse connections
O RefuseLA=35
# maximum number of children we allow at one time
O MaxDaemonChildren=35
Compiling sendmail is very easy, however, creating sendmail.cf file is a
bit tough. I can send you my config file, or few lines how to build it for
yourself. If don't use uucp, I'd prefer just sending you the config file.
Even I have it with antispam features!
martin
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Received on Fri Feb 20 1998 - 17:54:00 NZDT