[Mailman-Users] Re: run away process - cannot flock

[Brad Knowles]

At 10:17 PM -0500 2003/07/20, Paul H Byerly wrote:

>       My main mail logs have this entry 11 times in one second.
>
>  Jul 18 22:30:31 svr01 sendmail[24527]: h6J3UVp24527:   7: fl=0x0,
>  mode=100644: size=12288
>  Jul 18 22:30:31 svr01 sendmail[24527]: h6J3UVp24527: SYSERR(root):
>  cannot flock(/etc/mail/access.db, fd=7, type=1, omode=37777777777,
>  euid=0): No locks available

	As far as sendmail is concerned, this is a pretty serious 
problem.  This could be the fault of a kernel that is not configured 
sufficiently well to properly host the mailing list.  You may need to 
edit your kernel definitions, recompile and relink it, then reboot. 
This may need to be done several times, in order to find a suitable 
value for this number.  You may be lucky enough to find that this 
value can be tuned interactively, without actually rebuilding the 
kernel.

	Or, this could be the fault of processes grabbing too many locks 
and not releasing them.  In that case, the only thing you can do 
immediately is to reboot the box, but the misbehaved programs should 
be found and fixed or you'll just have to go through this over and 
over again.

>       Which seems to be the end of it - except that mail man would
>  not let go.  I let it run 15 minutes the second time, to see if it
>  would die on it's own.

	Mailman should not let this go, but then it also should not be 
re-trying so quickly.  It should schedule a re-try later, and give 
the system time to recover before the next attempt.  This re-try 
timeout should be measured in terms of minutes or hours, not seconds 
or micro-seconds.


	Unfortunately, I'm not sure I can provide any further assistance 
on this subject.  I don't know your OS (I've done most everything but 
Linux), and I'm not a programmer (so I can't get down in the guts of 
mailman).

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles at skynet.be>

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
     -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.

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