[CentOS] Huge mailq

Fri Feb 29 07:17:57 UTC 2008
Benjamin Smith <lists at benjamindsmith.com>

On Wednesday 27 February 2008, Christopher Chan wrote:
> procmail, postfix local, maildrop all support maildir. qmail is not even 
> necessary. Or is this your excuse to do a bit of qmail bashing?

Qmail bashing? Not at all. But I'm not endorsing Qmail, either, and I'm nice 
enough to say why... =) But there is a good analysis there of the advantages 
of maildir over mbox, especially when you start clustering and/or using 
shared storage resources. 

> > The additional complexity of NFS is what seems to have caused this 
gentleman's 
> > problem - not only did sendmail itself have to work properly, so did NFS, 
> > DNS, and the spam filter.  
> 
> Yawn. postfix + mysql + courier-authlib + cyrus-sasl + vpopmail + 
> spamassassin + clamav + maildrop.

You're so cool! (But OP got bit)

> > How to avoid it? Either: 
> > 
> > 1) Reduce complexity. (get rid of the need for DNS, NFS, etc. or 
> 
> What is your proposal for getting rid of DNS? I, for one, would like to 
> see how you intend to make email work without dns.

Read OP. 

He had a DNS failure which affected NFS is what screwed up mail delivery. 
Obviously, the mail server was doing something, even though DNS was at least 
partially unavailable. DNS isn't strictly necessary for NFS mounts, (which is 
the root of OP's problem) so configuring his servers so that a similar DNS 
failure happening wouldn't h0rk his NFS mount might be a good idea. 

Maybe. 

> > 2) "Beef up" the various pieces so they don't fail - make sure you are 
using 
> > high quality servers and equipment, or 
> > 
> > 3) Increase redundancy, so that no single point of failure exists. 
> > 
> > Why is he depending on a single DNS server? Why is he using NFS, with it's 
> > implicit single-point-of-failure rather than GlusterFS, which provides 
> > multiple-primary-host redundancy and automatic failover?  
> > http://www.gluster.org/
> > 
> 
> I do not know the answer to that one hotshot. Maybe you can ask the OP 
> nicely?

Hotshot? Just asking questions about his config that hopefully steer him 
towards a more reliable configuration. 

(hotshot?) 

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