[Exim] Exim not operating w/o strace?

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Author: Dan Egli
Date:  
To: exim-users
Subject: [Exim] Exim not operating w/o strace?
This is REALLY bugging me! it seems like for some reason exim will not respond to activity
on it's assigned ports unless there's an active strace on the daemon process.

For example: on my outbound mail server (recall from other emails that I'm using a
smarthost type of routing to get around my ISP's NT mail server), I have exim running on
port 25 to accept standard mails, then I have a hard link to exim called exim2 which I run
on port 4000 with no que runs. This setup has worked great for some time. Now lately,
exim2 will open a connection when a connection request arives on port 4000, then sit there
indeffinetly (not spawning a new process to handle the mail reception), until I strace it.
As soon as I load strace on it, boom. It wakes up and handles the mail flawlessly. It also
doesn't seem to be happening on port 25 (which is really wierd since they are the same
physical binary reading the same config file, just different command line paramaters) as I
can recieve mail from other places no problem.

Here is the ls showing they are the same binary:

[root@shortcircuit sbin]# ls -li exim exim2
  130406 -rwsr-xr-x    2 root     root       530246 Jul  2 10:27 exim
  130406 -rwsr-xr-x    2 root     root       530246 Jul  2 10:27 exim2



If I restart exim it works correctly for anywhere between 3-24 hours, then starts lagging
again. I really don't like the idea of restarting exim every 4 hours to ensure it works
correctly.

Anyone got any ideas?

Here's an example of what I get:

[root@shortcircuit root]# telnet localhost 25
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 shortcircuit.dyndns.org ESMTP Exim Thu, 05 Sep 2002 19:20:45 -0600
quit
221 shortcircuit.dyndns.org closing connection
Connection closed by foreign host.
[root@shortcircuit root]# telnet localhost 4000
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
(90 seconds later)
^]
telnet> q
Connection closed.