[H-GEN] Humbug machine problems and lost email
Robert Brockway
robert at timetraveller.org
Tue Sep 24 19:47:49 EDT 2002
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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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