It's not a bug, it's a feature...

Mon, 16 Oct 2006

And the mystery remains unsolved...

I've again disabled all use of TLS on outgoing mail on outgoing.csail.mit.edu. It seems like it might still be misbehaving. OTOH, the queue runners I've seen crashing may be left over from before I made the change to disable client-side certificates. In either case, I was very disappointed to see that exim was still segfaulting all weekend.

For the record, it's worth noting that no mail is getting lost, or even bounced, when exim crashes in this case. The mail has already been accepted into exim's queue by the time we see the crashes. That means that our server has taken responsibility for handing the message delivery. When it encounters a message that causes an unexpected problem like these signal 11s, it marks the message as "frozen" and saves it to disk. It's then up to an administrator (me) to investigate the problem and get the message delivered.

Posted by Noah Permalink Comments (0) 2006-10-16 17:58