root%costello.caltech.edu@hopkins.arpa (10/27/86)
We've had a recent problem with mail coming in over ethernet and are interested in hearing from others who may have had similar problems and warning the rest of you. The symptoms are simple and unmistakable: sendmail gags on incoming enet mail and writes a single line of the incoming message into its df* file ad infinitum (or until you crash with a full disk). I can't tell if the local sendmail infinite loops all by itself, or if it does it in collaboration with the remote sendmail. As much of the mail as is received seems perfectly kosher; however, we only receive it up to a point before going into the loop. This doesn't happen with all mail; in the last 5 weeks we have had only three occurences (two of those with the same remote system and on the same day). The problem has only occured with systems that are reached via route through a gateway; mail on our lan never gives us this problem. As a temporary fix (to prevent us from crashing), we attempted to put a cap on the size of email through our ether mailer by adding the expression 'M=100000' to the definition of our ether mailer (in sendmail.cf). The documentation suggests that this should limit mail passing through the mailer to 100000 bytes; however, we had an incident of this problem two nights ago (the first in 5 weeks) and the cap didn't work. ******************************************** On another matter, what has happened with the Ridge Users Group? We had a great first meeting; however, since then the silence has been deafening. lsf@costello.caltech.edu Sam Finn Theoretical Astrophysics California Institute of Technology