bbanerje@sjuvax.UUCP (12/08/83)
Hi,
A couple of days ago, our netmail really started going
wild. Any mail posted here failed to get delivered. Uuxqt would
try to invoke rmail, which failed (shio would return a value of
-1), and uuxqt would try to mail a message to that effect back to
the sender of the mail.
The problem as it turned out was that some turkey (who shall die
a slow and horrible death when I get my hands on him), had deleted
/dev/null, replacing it by a regular file that was only writeable
by root. However, the way things went after that was unexpected.
Apparently whenever anyone sent us something, uuxqt would start up
fail to invoke rmail (or rnews) and would send a message to that
effect back out. Uuxqt would then look for another X.* file to
execute, find the same one that had caused the problems previously,
and would then go through the same motions all over again.
The net result was that our spool file got filled up with millions
(actually thousands) of these error message files.
It seems to me that uuxqt should be able to avoid this loop somehow.
Does anyone out there in net-land know of a possible solution?
Thanks,
Binayak Banerjee
P.S. Thanks for all your help in solving this one, Bill (astrovax!wls).
--
Binayak Banerjee
{astrovax | bpa | burdvax}!sjuvax!bbanerje