[CentOS] Re: Sendmail: timeout waiting for input from local during Draining Input

on 12/7/2007 8:31 PM David Mackintosh spake the following:
> On Fri, Dec 07, 2007 at 11:54:26AM -0500, David Mackintosh wrote:
>> I've recently replaced a RedHat EL 3.x system with a CentOS 5 system
>> (fully yum'd as of Tuesday).  This was a full-pave install, although
>> we did copy the sendmail.mc from the original system.  
>>
>> Now I get a lot of this in my logs:
>>
>> Dec  7 11:47:38 mail sendmail[20117]: lB7Gl6w0020116: timeout waiting for input from local during Draining Input
>>
>> The only thing even remotely credible is a Sendmail Known Bugs page
>> which suggests it is a chatty local delivery agent, but since this is
>> happening with outbound messages I don't think I believe this.
>>
>> Does anyone have any ideas what Sendmail is trying to tell me here?
> 
> Further to this, I have discovered that what Sendmail is trying to
> tell me is "procmail and dovecot are not playing nicely together".
> 
> What is happening is that I have a large amount of mail coming and
> going, and when procmail tries to deliver to a mailbox (in mbox
> format, in /var/spool/mail/$user, currently 12MB in size but can grow
> MUCH larger) that dovecot is actively using, procmail blocks -- and
> so do all the other procmail processes waiting to deliver to this
> mailbox.  Sendmail gets annoyed waiting for these blocked procmail
> processes, and so fills my logs with the error message above.
> 
> If I do a "service dovecot stop", then the queued procmail processes all
> drain their messages into the affected mailbox, and the problem goes away
> for a little while after dovecot is restarted.
> 
> Naturally, the hack of stopping dovecot every so often isn't really
> a solution.
> 
> So the question is: how do I get dovecot and procmail to play nice?
> Is the solution to change to a maildir type inbox spool?
> 
You need to make sure that all three processes are using the same lock type, 
with sendmail V8.13 is fcntl. Sometimes I see dovecot defaults with flock 
enabled, and it could be causing the lock contentions. Also make sure that you 
didn't somehow enable dovecot's deliver while procmail is still enabled.

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