[Exim] too many connections

Last night one of our mail servers stopped receiving mail

2000-09-02 02:26:38 13V24s-0002BE-00 Completed
2000-09-02 02:32:02 Connection from 139.133.7.28 refused: too many connections
2000-09-02 02:32:32 Connection from 139.133.7.24 refused: too many connections

This went on to about 7am when everything started up again. The previous log
entry was 5mins earlier so it did not look like a busy system. I suppose
someone could have been hitting port 25 hard.

The mailhubs reported

2000-09-02 02:32:02 13V2A4-0000yx-00 SMTP error from remote mailer after initial connection: host mailserv.abdn.ac.uk [139.133.7.29]: 421 mailserv.abdn.ac.uk: Too many concurrent SMTP connections; please try again later.


When it started to clear there were some log messages

2000-09-02 07:08:58 unexpected disconnection while reading SMTP data from mailhub1.abdn.ac.uk [139.133.7.28] (error: Connection reset by peer)

Any ideas what may have been going on?

I only noticed this had happened because I run an MRTG display on the
number of messages received/delivered and that indicated clearly
something was wrong.

John Linn (j.linn@???)