Hi folks

We have a 8.13.4 as our border MTA and are observing an increasing
number of hanging sendmail processes in the read cmd state. I _believe_
these are open sessions with lame (spamming) servers on the other side.
Nevertheless, over time these processes block our MTA as the number of
sendmail processes goes past the limit.

I see that Timeout.command is set to 1h by default. Is that the relevant
timeout in this case and is there a problem when I set it to, let's say 5m?

Thanks

Erich Titl

Erich Titl schrieb:
> We have a 8.13.4 as our border MTA and are observing an increasing
> number of hanging sendmail processes in the read cmd state. I _believe_
> these are open sessions with lame (spamming) servers on the other side.
> Nevertheless, over time these processes block our MTA as the number of
> sendmail processes goes past the limit.

Same problem here. In my case, I positively confirmed that those are
misbehaved spambots which don't close the TCP connection when rejected.

> I see that Timeout.command is set to 1h by default. Is that the relevant
> timeout in this case and is there a problem when I set it to, let's say 5m?

I did just that. It helped a lot and I have noticed no ill effects so far.

Sendmail's timeout values are, in general, *very* conservative. I have
difficulties imagining a situation where a client would take more than
a couple of seconds to transmit its next SMTP command. But perhaps the
experts can say more on that.

HTH
T.

--
Please excuse my bad English/German/French/Greek/Cantonese/Klingon/...

Tilman Schmidt wrote:
> Erich Titl schrieb:
....>
> Same problem here. In my case, I positively confirmed that those are
> misbehaved spambots which don't close the TCP connection when rejected.
>
>> I see that Timeout.command is set to 1h by default. Is that the relevant
>> timeout in this case and is there a problem when I set it to, let's say 5m?
>
> I did just that. It helped a lot and I have noticed no ill effects so far.
>

Thanks for the info, I set mine to 5m to still be on the conservative
side and it looks like the problem is not as bad anymore. Even so I
occasionally observe the same situation. I will go down to 1m to get rid
of this nuisance.

Erich