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. -- MailScanner is like deodorant... You hope everybody uses it, and you notice quickly if they don't!!!!