Comments on: Of Qmail, Zombies and qmail-remote timeout issues.

By: Lawrence Sheed

Lawrence Sheed — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 02:22:35 +0000

Yahoo does tarpitting – so that may be the issue.

I’d suggest also install some kind of local dns caching lookup in your computer, especially if its a mail server.
I used to use djb’s dnscache, but now I prefer unbound. Easy to install, and just works.

It also has DNSSec, so it checks that the records do come from the appropriate server.

I can’t use the DNSSec stuff in China, as China’s DNS internally does not compute!
They do a few naughty things to the DNS records, plus they own the root servers, and sign things they shouldn’t.

In China I get to find out about lots of “interesting” issues that you don’t see oversea’s hehe.

By: Bob

Bob — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 14:43:31 +0000

This script worked great for me on a Centos 5.5 box. I actually have a weird issue where my yahoo.com emails sometime get stuck during the DNS lookup. This will go on for days. With your script, not only did the qmail-remote processes not only clear out, but I noticed that qmail was smart enough to try the messages one more time and actually deliver and/or bounce them!

Very happy with this. I might suggest a –quiet option for those who are not comfortable redirecting to null in their crontab scripts.

Keep up the good work. It’s always nice to know somebody has dealt with the same problems you have, and you’re not crazy.

By: Lawrence Sheed

Lawrence Sheed — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:21:23 +0000

Suggest do:

man kill

And see what CentOS 5.2 wants for parameters. Amend script accordly (and let me know, so I can update it to cater for that).

By: Ricardo

Ricardo — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 11:29:37 +0000

Hi!

Great script, I think I will use it… but kill -9 PID does not seem to kill the defunct process… Any help? It’s a CentOS 5.2…