[nycbug-talk] Stablity fixed??? Maybe???

[Matt Juszczak]

Hi all,

Part of this message I cross posted to freebsd-questions, but no one there 
is going to give me a good answer ... so I'd like a 2nd opinion :)

After removing IPF and having a week of stability, we decided to put
our mail server to the test today.

I began flooding it with tons of mail messages using smtp-source at about 
2 pm today.  The server load jumped up to about 4.50 average.  It 
eventually started denying requests, but after waiting a few minutes, it 
would accept them again (I was literally flooding it, I sent in all 1.2 
million emails).

I wrote a scipt to hammer it, so even after it would refuse the connection,
it would hammer it again.  Eventually, the machine started to not respond.
I could ping it with successful replies, but could not SSH into it.  The
last message on the screen was "Could not write to /var/mail/thissucks",
which was the account we were testing.

I rebooted the machine, and all is fine.  I'm not sure if this is still a
sign of instability, or if this is a "Any idiot who would sent 1.2 million
emails and a full flood for hours to a mail server should expect something
like this to happen" message.

Any input?

Thanks!

-Matt