From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Sep 21 21:51:21 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from xena.gsicomp.on.ca (cr677933-a.ktchnr1.on.wave.home.com [24.42.130.87]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id F2F4E37B446 for ; Thu, 21 Sep 2000 21:51:17 -0700 (PDT) Received: from zircon (matt.gsicomp.on.ca [192.168.0.18]) by xena.gsicomp.on.ca (8.10.1/8.9.2) with SMTP id e8M4pGs69240; Fri, 22 Sep 2000 00:51:16 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from matt@gsicomp.on.ca) Message-ID: <002e01c02450$c886e080$1200a8c0@zircon> From: "Matthew Emmerton" To: , "Bigwillie" References: <4.2.0.58.20000921224146.00992f00@mail-hub.optonline.net> Subject: Re: Help the daemons are killing it Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 00:51:34 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4133.2400 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4133.2400 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > Its like world war 13 in that box. I ran top while this was going on, and > sendmail and local.mail were on top just running things. If they were "running away" filling up your mail spool as fast as they can, check your crontab setup. Most likely you've forgotten to redirect the output of the scripts / programs you're running in your crontab to /dev/null or a log file. If you don't, then cron will mail the output to root. If you're starting Seti@Home from crontab without redirecting the output, then cron will be emailing root with all the status information that the Seti@Home client churns out to the console. This could be responsible for why your mailbox is filling up. > Its kind of amusing to see this happen. Since its an experimental box, I > dont care about what happens to it. My real issue is how could I find out > where all of this information is being written to. At one moment > /var/mail/root had a huge file size then it would go down then up again, so > maybe the rest was in the spool, dont know. You're looking in the right place. /var/mail/root is root's mbox, and /var/spool/mqueue is the mail queue. > Another issue, why is cron so difficult to setup. It's not difficult to set up at all. Just make sure that you read the manpage for 'crontab'. -- Matthew Emmerton GSI Computer Services +1 (800) 217-5409 (Canada) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message