[wplug] RE: Is mail up or down??

[James O'Kane]

On Thu, 2 Sep 2004, Ken Rambler wrote:

> stat=Deferred: Connection time out with smtp2.easydns.com.
>
> Wplug mail is down??
>
> If you need a backup DNS, send me your zone file. (Whenever you get this
> message)

This isn't a DNS issue. If it were, your mail server wouldn't have known
to try and contact smtp2.easydns.com as an MX server. There are 5
geographically distributed servers provided by easydns.

That error just means smtp2 didn't respond fast enough for whatever
reason. Presumable smtp was busy as well. Eitherway, mail was designed
with retransmissions in mind.

The very short story is power went out where the machine lives on
Thursday afternoon. When power was restored, the network drivers didn't
load properly on boot. On Friday morning, many errors reported on /var and
later tests proved that the disk was failing. We took the machine off line
for the weekend and bought a bunch more hardware.
The machine is up again in a limited capacity, and I'm working on
reconfiguring things the way we like them.

There were 1000 messages on the secondary MX server when I started
sendmail. Not all of those are non-spam, but each one that is will
generate about 300+ more messages so it might take a while for the backlog
to be processed.

-james