[H-GEN] Humbug machine problems and lost email

[Robert Brockway]

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On Tue, 24 Sep 2002, Greg Black wrote:

I said:

> | Right now I'm not up on the exact details of the outage but if there was a
> | hardware problem any messages on disk at the time of the crash may have
> | bitten the bullet :( This is conjecture only though.
>
> This seems like a long shot.  In general, a message makes its
> way through various hosts until it reaches its destination.  In
> this case, the destination host sees that the message is now to
> be sent elsewhere and does so immediately.  So, unless the crash
> happens in that couple of seconds, the message should not be
> lost.

Caliburn was queuing mail & flushing periodically last I checked so mail
could have been on disk for several minutes before finally getting sent
on.  But I believe that a minimum of mail would have been on-disk at the
time of the crash.

> But the messages that were sent on Saturday and Sunday have not
> been delivered.  The Saturday message got one of those warning
> messages from mailer-daemon at mailhub1.uq.edu.au:
>
> <gjb at humbug.org.au>... Deferred: Connection timed out with caliburn.humbug.org.au.
> Warning: message still undelivered after 12 hours
> Will keep trying until message is 2 weeks old

Ok, so we know mailhub1.uq.edu.au had the message at that time and would
have attempted resends later (at a time of its convenience).  We could
ETRN the mail server & force delivery of mail queued for humbug.org.au (if
it accepts ETRN).

> I've heard nothing about this one since this message at 0348 on
> Sunday.  Another message that was sent on Sunday was accepted by
> one of the MX hosts and has not yet appeared.  Normally, over
> such a time, it would have been re-tried ages ago and caliburn
> would have been up and ...

I agree.  I would have expected delivery attempts no worse than every few
hours in most cases.  We should have seen the mail by now.

I gather the send never got as bounce back?

> Yes, this might even provide some useful clues about mail
> routing and general message handling.  I don't actually care
> about the lost messages in this case -- but I do like to know
> what happens to email that doesn't get to its intended target.

Same.

Cheers,
	Rob

-- Robert Brockway B.Sc. email: robert at timetraveller.org  ICQ: 104781119
   Linux counter project ID #16440 (http://counter.li.org)
   "The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens" -Baha'u'llah



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