What's the reason for the burst of sendmail complaints below?
My CentOS 4.3 server only handles internal mail for my small network. It doesn't handle Internet mail at all, so I guess I can't blame a crack attempt for this. IPTables rules should prevent external connections to everything except SSH's port 22.
I've looked through the other logs hoping that some other activity would be seen at this time as well. Nothing. the surrounding entries in /var/log/maillog are perfectly reasonable. As far as I can tell this 14-minute burst of sendmail activity exists in isolation.
Can anyone suggest a reason for these log entries?
Thanks.
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May 25 07:09:24 server sendmail[2942]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 24 May 25 07:09:39 server sendmail[2942]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 25 May 25 07:09:54 server sendmail[2942]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 26 May 25 07:10:09 server sendmail[2942]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 29 May 25 07:10:24 server sendmail[2942]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 31 May 25 07:10:39 server sendmail[2942]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 32 May 25 07:10:54 server sendmail[2942]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 33 May 25 07:11:24 server last message repeated 2 times May 25 07:11:39 server sendmail[2942]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 34 May 25 07:12:24 server last message repeated 3 times May 25 07:12:39 server sendmail[2942]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 34 May 25 07:12:54 server sendmail[2942]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 33 May 25 07:13:09 server sendmail[2942]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 32 May 25 07:13:24 server sendmail[2942]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 31 May 25 07:13:54 server last message repeated 2 times May 25 07:14:09 server sendmail[2942]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 30 May 25 07:14:54 server last message repeated 3 times May 25 07:15:25 server last message repeated 2 times May 25 07:15:40 server sendmail[2942]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 29 May 25 07:15:55 server sendmail[2942]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 29 May 25 07:16:10 server sendmail[2942]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 28 May 25 07:16:25 server sendmail[2942]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 27 May 25 07:16:40 server sendmail[2942]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 26 May 25 07:16:55 server sendmail[2942]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 25 May 25 07:17:10 server sendmail[2942]: accepting connections again for daemon MTA May 25 07:17:45 server sendmail[2942]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 24 May 25 07:18:00 server sendmail[2942]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 25 May 25 07:18:15 server sendmail[2942]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 27 May 25 07:18:30 server sendmail[2942]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 28 May 25 07:18:45 server sendmail[2942]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 29 May 25 07:19:00 server sendmail[2942]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 30 May 25 07:19:45 server last message repeated 3 times May 25 07:20:00 server sendmail[2942]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 29 May 25 07:20:15 server sendmail[2942]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 28 May 25 07:20:45 server last message repeated 2 times May 25 07:21:00 server sendmail[2942]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 25 May 25 07:21:15 server sendmail[2942]: accepting connections again for daemon MTA
Steve Snyder wrote:
system loads > 20 are not normal, try running 'sar' over a period of time to figure out whats going on, are you seeing very high iowait or it could even be d-state proc's causing this high load.
your solution to the issue is going to be working out what / why such a high load is being reported.
- KB
On Friday 26 May 2006 7:15 am, Steve Snyder wrote:
What's the reason for the burst of sendmail complaints below?
[snip]
Several people (thanks, guys!) explained the situation to me. I thought that it was Sendmail itself that was experiencing the high load, which shouldn't ever happen. The real story is that it was the system that was experiencing the high load.
The cause of the system high load is no mystery. I was doing a "make -j3" kernel build around that time, so there was high CPU and disk utilization. I wasn't aware when I posted my question that Sendmail monitors system load.
Thanks.
On Fri, 2006-05-26 at 06:15, Steve Snyder wrote:
What's the reason for the burst of sendmail complaints below?
This doesn't mean sendmail is busy, it means sendmail has noticed that the machine is busy doing other things and since mail will be queued and retried, it stops processing any until the load goes down. You might check your cron entries to see if anything else is started around the time in question to explain the load - or it could have been programs you were running at the console.
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Karanbir Singh -
Les Mikesell -
Steve Snyder