On 01-Oct-99 at 09:50:12 John Horne wrote:
> The first incident involved a student mailing a message to 3000 users.
> Unfortunately she had included some recipients as "Joe
> Bloggs@???". This was rejected by exim (3.03) with a 550 error
> stating that the syntax of the recipient was incorrect. Generally our
> staff/student mail goes from the mailhub to Novell file servers running
> Mercury. The file server seemed to be sending the message back to the
> mailhub - but no loop was detected. I assume it did this because it had no
> deleived the message to everyone. The exim process handling the message
> was gradually building up a huge amount of memory - reaching about 200MB.
> The system has 64MB main memory and about 128MB of additional swap space.
> Hence we started getting panic messages about the system running out of
> swap space...
>
Well we added another 64MB of physical memory to the system and all looks
well. I cannot explain why the original problem occurred since we have had
the same physical spec of the machine for some time and sent out many
messages to the staff and students (some lists bigger than 3000, some
smaller), with no problems at all.
One point which others in the UK may have noticed is that since the start of
the academic year our mailhub and web server have seen a significant
increase in use. This was also 'verified' (?) by the fact that UKERNA
informed us, after we queried them, that the national network (JANET) link to
the UK south-west was saturated. Something they hadn't expected either. We
gather that the trans-atlantic link has also taken a bit of a battering from
all the students! At present transfers from London to here seem to be running
at 10% of what they were during the summer.
John.
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John Horne, University of Plymouth, UK Tel: +44 (0)1752 233914
E-mail: jhorne@???
Finger for PGP key: john@???
