Hi All,

Hope I can get some help here as this is doing my head in... I have a Root Server with EasySpace running Plesk 8.6, on Centos 4.6 Linux.

I was trying to trouble shoot a PHP form which was sending mail a couple of days ago, and 18 test messages dropped into my Gmail inbox this morning at 3:17! The form and email account are both on the same server, so it's not as though anything external has affected things. I also had another client on the server report a similar issue, although some domain names and email addresses are working without any problems. There haven't been any bounce messages either...

Any help is very much appreciated!

Thanks,

Steve

Pretty tough to tell what's going on without the maillogs. Check /var/log/maillog for errors and/or warnings to look for clues.

Hi all,

Following up my post earlier, I figured my problem is something to do with DrWeb anti-virus... The next problem is that this is grinding my server to a complete halt (almost).

Last I know of the load average was when it hit 61.73, before that window froze... Fortunately I've got another window open, but it's taking about 90 seconds to even register my key-presses and show this back to me.

The problem is that DrWeb/Qmail has spiralled out of control, and I need to stop it - fast! I don't have physical access to the machine, and unfortunately the guys at the hosting company went home an hour ago.

So I'm up sh*t creek... Anyone got a paddle? Or maybe some ideas of how to wrestle this beast back into control?!

Thanks,

Steve

Sounds to me like spam and or related queuing issues. I had to deal with issues like this with qmail a few years back. Our solution ended up upgrading to postfix. We actually had some or a few scripts that would help us if we caught the problem early enough to clear the queues, etc, but most of the time it would spiral out of control and really the only thing we found to do was to reboot the machine.

Sorry I don't have much else to offer but if the guys that have physical access are gone, doesn't sound like great support to me, you'll probably save yourself the agonizing pain of waiting and waiting between keystrokes by just rebooting, then diagnosing the problem further by reviewing the logs, etc.

And I'm serious about upgrading to postfix, it is superior to qmail, don't let anyone else argue that, everything is better than qmail, the U.S. postal service is a better alternative to qmail. Sorry, I'm bitter from my experiences with qmail.

Thanks for the feedback, trickykid. I will certainly look at changing things on the server after this as Qmail has officially p*ssed me off too. Unfortunately for me, it's what Plesk bundle in and keeping things standard makes life easier for us web guys (in theory).

I've been sat here for 30 minutes just trying to get the server to do a hard reboot - I've just issued the following commands so will hang-tight and see what happens:

And if this doesn't work, I'm going to go home and deal with a server-full of angry clients in the morning. (

Steve

Yeah, when a system is making it impossible to even diagnose and nothing is really working anyways, a reboot never hurts to hopefully get it back to a sane state so you can at least keep from pulling your hair out while determining the problem.

OK, I eventually got the thing rebooted and it's not stabilized on the load so I can try and figure out my original issue and see why Plesk and DrWeb have broken...

The problem is to do with DrWeb anti-virus which comes bundled with Plesk...

There are ~12,350 messages sat in /var/drweb/spool/ and I haven't got a clue how to push these through to their recipients...

I'd like to just uninstall the thing but don't fancy breaking the emails any more in the process!

Anyone got any ideas?

Steve

Hmm, I'm not familiar with that particular application. Sorry

Related topics merged.

Is it normal for the system to generate that many e-mail messages? Is it possible that some spammers are abusing the PHP scripts to try to send spam through your server?