Red Hat systematicly dieing.........

[jmachardy oxygen com (Jason MacHardy)]

1.We setup a redhat 6.0 machine some time ago, to run sendmail, and act as a
mail server.
We added a few scripts to it to, and some cron jobs. We configured it to:
a.forward messages from accounts to others.
b.send out a customized auto response to each email.
c.once a week, compile mail in each account, into a text file, and send to a
receipiant.
All went well, for some time.

2.Until one day, suddenly its getting all its email returned. Now this had
to do with that wonderful but missed 3rd party relay built into sendmail.
No-Spam servers world wide, now had us on our list. We fixed it, and rebuilt
the configuration file. Contacted the no-spam folks, and had us removed.
Yay, everything's ago.

3.Wrong, when we rebiult the config file for sendmail, the alias host name
(ie @domain.com instead of mail.domain.com) didn't take. I fixed it
manually, and everything seemed ok.

4.Wrong again, now the mail queue was backing up left and right. Emails
bouncing all over the place. Checked the logs, its not spam or no spam
filters, just straight up bad emails. Ok, so i wipe the mail queue and
restart the service, everything works again.

5.Wrong yet again, now not only does the mail queue back up lickity split,
but now if I even try to write to a config file using the control panel, I
get "no disk space available to write to "blah.cf"". Ok, so i check the disk
space. Hmmm, says there's 200 MB free in the var dir. It's set to like 265
anyway. Ok, so why does it say that? Hell if I know, it still says it today.
I even wasted some backed up log files. Nope, its still insists there's no
disk space.

6.Ok, screw the OS, it doesn't know what's up, I'll move the mail queue to a
completely free partition. This one, is 1.7gigs. ok, there it goes,
permissions set and all. Hmm, why does it report that the mail queue in
var/spool is full when I try to send, when its not even in var? That makes
no sense.

7.To top that off, I can't find m4 anywhere on my system. Where'd it go? How
can I get it back?

8. System now crashes after 20 minutes of running, and attempts to reboot
xwindows, and eventually fails. Strange, I didn't type reboot anywhere...

9.When it does reboot, it rewrites the sendmail.cf file, to the old
settings....uhhh, not only is there no linuxconf for it to look up, but the
old sendmail.cf files are no where near the same as the one that's loading
up! Where is it getting this mysterious file from?

10.Whoa, "user directory not found", wow, 6 user account directorys
vanished. Well, I'll rebuild them! :) Wait! AGGH! I can't it says "no disk
space available to write to blah.cf!" Jesus, well, now I have 6 email
accounts that are bouncing emails to them. Aggh.

Ok, so all in all, the OS thinks there's no disk space, and it's wrong.
There's ass loads of disk space.
At this point, I'm about to rebuild the whole as it is. If anyone has any
ideas, please LET ME KNOW!!!

And finally, for anyone whom says "any idiot can now use unix with
xwindows", let me tell you something, YOU'RE DEAD WRONG. This is the most
I've ever gotten into unix aside from shells, and man, it's confusing and
disorientating as can be. If you DONT know what the commands are, and if you
don't have some basic underlying knowledge and experience with unix,
xwindows is not going to make it any easier on you. In fact, I've found it
more confusing!!!

Thanx.