Q: My Release 3.0 client or mailhost machines are extremely slow. When I look at the processes, I see that there are several hung sendmail processes, and mail isn't being sent. My mailhost is a Sun (or a third party PC gateway program such as Banyan Vines or CCMAIL).
A: There are timing problems within the sendmail code on Release 3.0 that cause
mail traversing Sun mailhosts (and certain mail gateways such as Banyan
Vines and CCMAIL) to hang and take up excessive process time. The symptoms usually are:
| Machine is extremely slow. | |
| The sendmail process is using too much CPU time, or many sendmail processes are running, but never complete. | |
| Mail is not being delivered to the mailhost, or to the gateway. |
The solution is as follows:
| Rename the file /usr/lib/sendmail to /usr/lib/sendmail.30. | |
| Copy /usr/lib/sendmail.old to /usr/lib/sendmail. The file sendmail.old is NeXT's Release 2 version of sendmail, and alleviates the timing errors. |
Perform this procedure on Release 3.0 clients and/or any NeXT mailhosts which are forwarding mail to one of the above gateways.
Make sure the permissions are set correctly on the sendmail file:
-r-sr-x--x 1 root wheel 81920 Jul 21 14:48 sendmail*
QA882
Valid for 3.0 only