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Date:      Sat, 28 Mar 1998 11:20:07 +1100
From:      Sue Blake <sue2@welearn.com.au>
To:        Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: sendmail death note
Message-ID:  <19980328112007.32037@welearn.com.au>
In-Reply-To: <19980328101345.06263@freebie.lemis.com>; from Greg Lehey on Sat, Mar 28, 1998 at 10:13:45AM %2B1030
References:  <19980328005749.40823@zip.com.au> <19980328080111.52681@freebie.lemis.com> <19980328094534.24608@welearn.com.au> <19980328101345.06263@freebie.lemis.com>

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On Sat, Mar 28, 1998 at 10:13:45AM +1030, Greg Lehey wrote:
> On Sat, 28 March 1998 at  9:45:34 +1100, Sue Blake wrote:
> > On Sat, Mar 28, 1998 at 08:01:11AM +1030, Greg Lehey wrote:
> >> On Sat, 28 March 1998 at  0:57:49 +1000, Sue Blake wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Can anyone translate this for me?
> >>>
> >>> sendmail: NOQUEUE: SYSERR(root): SMTP-MAIL: died on signal 11
> >>> /kernel: pid 18983 (sendmail), uid 0 exited on signal 11
> >>>
> >>> These two errror messges have been alternating for two hours.
> >>> All I've figured out is "signal 11" means something awful is happening :-(
> >>> There's a vaguely similar question in the archives but no answer.
> >>
> >> Signal 11 is SIGSEGV.  In programming terms, it means that the program
> >> has attempted to access memory which doesn't belong to it.
> >>
> >> In the case of sendmail, I'd guess that there's something wrong with
> >> the sendmail configuration.  Have you changed anything recently?
> >
> > Nope. Later it started acting up again and then complained something about
> > running out of swap.
> 
> That'll do it.  If you can't allocate swap, you can't allocate memory.
> sendmail, innocent, tries to access it anyway and runs into a brick
> wall.
> 
> I see you have 24 MB of swap.  Especially considering you only have 8
> MB of main memory, that's far too little.  I know the disk's small,
> but all the more reason for fewer partitions:
> 
> 8 partitions:
> #        size   offset    fstype   [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
>   a:    65536        0    4.2BSD        0     0     0   # (Cyl.    0 - 31)
>   b:    53248    65536      swap                        # (Cyl.   32 - 57)
>   c:   595968        0    unused        0     0         # (Cyl.    0 - 290)
>   e:    61440   118784    4.2BSD        0     0     0   # (Cyl.   58 - 87)
>   f:   415744   180224    4.2BSD        0     0     0   # (Cyl.   88 - 290)
> 
> I'd recommend at *least* 32 MB, maybe 48 MB of swap (though the fact
> that you've got away so far suggests that 32 would probably do for
> this machine).  While you're at it, I'd also recommend merging
> partitions e and f.

Aaaaahhaaa... thanks for all that. Until I can organise a full backup and
restore I guess thrashing ten logins at once will have to stop :-(

> > I logged out to give it a chance to catch up with
> > itself and that didn't help. Eventually the poor thing became incoherent.
> > Then I cleared the swap the only way I knew how: by rebooting.
> 
> Stopping processes helps too.

Hehe, some bailed out voluntarily. I tried in vain to stop at least sendmail
between the pesky screen scribble, but now that I know it's worth doing I'll
try harder if this happens again.

Thanks for informing as well as helping :-)

-- 

Regards,
        -*Sue*-

find / -name "*.conf" |more


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