Re: {bb} Problems monitoring SMTP Service

[Philip Clark <bblist@cannae.uklinux.net>]

On Tue, 2005-08-30 at 08:32, Dirk H. Schulz wrote:
> Philip Clark schrieb:
> 
> >In summary, the BBSLEEP setting defines the interval between tests, so
> >the minimum downtime that BB will report will be the same as BBSLEEP,
> >more or less.
> >  
> >
> But less? How can it report e. g. 4.5 minutes if BBSLEEP is 5 minutes?

Yep. What Henrik said :) I like the bus analogy myself. The busses
might leave the depot at regular intervals, but they're unlikely
to arrive at your bus stop with the same regularity - unless you
live in Switzerland :)

> >The most likely cause of the reported failures is that the SMTP
> >server is "throttling", rejecting new connections due to a load
> >spike. The numeric response code of the failed connection, as
> >shown on your display, should indicate the
> >
> Where do I find the numerical response code? All the display page says is
> 
>     mailgw2.itsystemsservice.de - smtp
>     red Tue Aug 30 09:07:01 CEST 2005 SERVER - smtp DOWN
> 
> It is really unlikely that the smtp server is throttling because its 
> machines that idle most of the time: secondary and tertiary mail 
> gateways e.g. But I will have a look at that.

OK. This doesn't look like a server rejecting the mail. It would
appear to be a connection problem. Can you confirm a couple of
things:

  1. Can you check in the mail log that you can see a connection
     from your BBNET machine that corresponds to the start of
     a period that BB reports the machine down. I wouldn't rely
     too heavily on the timestamps here unless the machines are
     perfectly synchronized. Just follow the BBNET connections
     in the log and see if there is a gap.

  2. Can you also give us some idea of the type of hardware that
     connects the subnets which are being traversed. There are
     some things that will handle TCP and ICMP differently. It's
     possible that "ping" is always accepted and "smtp"
     occasionally blocked.

  3. Are you testing anything on the mail servers other than
     "conn" and "smtp"? If so, do these test also report
     problems?

Cheers, Phil.



-- 
Speer's 1st Law of Proofreading: The visibility of an error is inversely
proportional to the number of times you have looked at it.

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