I need harmony. I’m overwhelmed with work and thoughts about existence, you know it’s a terrible thing to think about the human existence all the time. The time passes slowly. Today I went throught a lot of stress. It seems that I did a mistake when modifying the server firewall in Friday when we moved pozvanete and connections about the aids were not possible thanksfully Vladi said it will be fixed. Bobb reported that efficiencylaboratory system does not send emails when I take a look I saw the qmail queue was broken ( something I see for a first time ). qmail-qstat reported empty queue while qmail-qread reported empty. I found this about fixing messed queues http://pyropus.ca/software/queue-repair/. After running it over the queue and restarting the mail server few times it seemed to work at the end. I experience terrible problem when trying to run jailkit on one Debian Sarge machine, I’m trying to figure out what is the reason few days ago with no luck a terrible thing even stracing the jk_socket does not provide with anything that could lead to a solution when I’m logging into the machine with the jailed user the auth.log indicates that login is successful and sftp-server is spawned while the sftp client closes the connection. I’ll be looking at this later again I really ran out of ideas aboud a possible solution.I’m very tired I need rest. Too often I despair sometimes I want to cry, there is so much unrightfulness in the world. On Saturday night me and Nomen decided to do a pretty Ñ€eckless thing we catched the train for Botevo and spend the night in a forest around a fire. This time we was equiped at least we had a torch. We baked bread and potatoes on the fire and made a sort of sandwiches with a salt and cucumbers. At least this time we went to the other forest and there were trees all around so it wasn’t necessary to search for them in the darkness. All the forecast said it would rain. But Praise the Lord it didn’t. (We even prayed a little to God not to rain cause we had not the proper equipment ). Thanksfully again God heard our prayers. The only bad side of our great adventure was that after 1:00 o’clock in the morning the temperature started falling and it was extremely cold. I was able to sleep just for 40 minutes or so. In the morning after 6:00 the birds started to awaken and sing, so beautiful voices all around, even flickers :]. In went to the Botevo’s railway station and in 8:40 take the train back to Dobrich. I went home and took a shower then went to bed. I was woken by a telephone call and it was the missionary which call me two days ago wanted to see me and speak about the faith, he call me to remind me of our meeting ( from the way he speaks I undestood he is a Mormon ). So I decided to rewrite the Orthodox Creed of Faith and show him and explain them what I believe. When we met they were very kind to me and after some time they supposed to go to their church to explain us about their faith. I went their and they started talking strange things they wanted to pray together ( I rejected ofcourse ). How can we pray a prayer I have no idea about.After a lot of discussion about the Gospel and the truth Church they got angry and chased me out of their sect/”church” ;]They tried to lie they tried to claim they’re orthodox Christians in the first cause I told them I’m orthodox. One of the Moroms tried to convince me he knows more about orthodox Christianity more than me. Other of the two cited me a some Writting in the Book of Jeremiah trying to convince me I have existed before my birth, I told him this is occult (this was my opinion ofcourse God knows best).END—–
Posts Tagged ‘software queue’
Harmony
Monday, April 2nd, 2007How to fix a broken QMAIL queue with queue-repair and qmhandle
Friday, May 27th, 2011
The aim of this small post is to give just a brief idea of how I fix my qmail server after breaking it or in case it is broken after mail bomb attacks, etc.
Most common cases when I break my qmail queue myself, are after I’m implementing some new patches and reinstall parts of the qmail server with a patched version of default qmail binaries.
On other occasions, I simply used the qmailctl to start or stop the server as a part of some routine tasks necessery for the administration of the qmail server.
Everybody who has already experience with qmail should have experienced, that qmail is very fragile and could break even with a simple changes, though if it works once it’s rock solid piece of mail servant.
Below I explain few ways I used through my days as a qmail sys admin to deal with broken or messed queues.
1. Fixing a broken qmail queue using automatic tools There are few handy tools which in most cases are able to solve issues with the queue, one very popular one isqueue-repair – check http://pyropus.ca/software/queue-repair/.
Installation of qmail-repair is dead easy, but it needs to be installed from source as no official debian package is available:
linux:/usr/local/src# wget http://pyropus.ca/software/queue-repair/queue-repair-0.9.0.tar.gz
linux:/usr/local/src# tar -xzvvf queue-repair-0.9.0.tar.gzdrwxr-xr-x charlesc/qcc 0 2003-10-22 16:54 queue-repair-0.9.0/
-rw-r--r-- charlesc/qcc 268 2003-10-22 16:54 queue-repair-0.9.0/TODO
-rw-r--r-- charlesc/qcc 1700 2003-10-22 16:54 queue-repair-0.9.0/CHANGELOG
-rw-r--r-- charlesc/qcc 18007 2003-10-22 16:54 queue-repair-0.9.0/COPYING
-rw-r--r-- charlesc/qcc 1098 2003-10-22 16:54 queue-repair-0.9.0/BLURB
-rwxr-xr-x charlesc/qcc 26286 2003-10-22 16:54 queue-repair-0.9.0/queue_repair.py
To check if there are issues fixable within the qmail queue it’s as easy as:
linux:/usr/local/src# cd queue-repair-0.9.0
linux:/usr/local/src/queue-repair-0.9.0# ./queue-repair -t
...
checking files...
checking queue/mess files...
checking split locations...
The tool will walk through the mail sub-directories containing mail queued files in /var/qmail/queue and will list any issues found.
It’s recommended that the qmail server is stopped before any queue modify operations are issued on the server:
linux:/usr/local/src# qmailctl stop
...
Further on in order to solve any found issues with the queue, there is the “-r”/repair option:
linux:/usr/local/src/queue-repair-0.9.0# ./queue-repair -r
...
Another tool which comes handy whether a repair of a messed qmail queue is needed is qmhandle – http://sourceforge.net/projects/qmhandle/
The use of qmhandle is also pretty easy, all one has to do is to follow the usual classical steps of a download the source & compile:
linux:/usr/local/src# wget https://www.pc-freak.net/files/qmhandle-1.3.2.tar.gz
linux:/usr/local/src# tar -zxvvf qmhandle-1.3.2
...
linux:/usr/local/src# cd qmhandle-1.3.2
Once again it’s necessery that the qmail server is stopped via its init script before qmHandle tool is used, e.g.:
linux:~# qmailctl stop
...
There is a difference between qmail queue repair tool and qmail handle , while qmail queue-repair tool is used to fix improper permissions of queued files with the qmail queue, qmhandle ‘s application is to completely delete the stored mail contents of a broken queue.
Deleting all the qmail queue content is in some cases the only option to fix the queue.
Often such a drastic measure is required after a heavy mail server overload, let’s say a result of spammers or caused by virus infected mail users which send a massive amounts of spam mails.
Thus at many cases when queue-repair was unable to solve a queue mess, I use qmhandble and sacrifice all the queued emails by completely wiping them out like so:
linux:/usr/local/src/qmhandle-1.3.2# ./qmhandle -D
...
Above command would eradicate all queued emails. Hopefully after the qmail server gets launched again with qmailctl start all the mail server operations should be back to normal.
Note that the use of qmhandle’s queue delete capabilities is pretty dangerous, if you forgot to stop the qmail server before issuing the above command!
Note that in order to use both qmHandle and queue-repair tools you will need to install python interpreter as both of the tools are written in python.
To check what is currently in the queue in Qmail, there are also native tools available, as you should probably know if you have dealt with qmail, e.g.:
debian:~# qmail-qstat
debian:~# qmail-qstat
messages in queue: 2
messages in queue but not yet preprocessed: 0
Often when there are problems with Qmail and more specificly with qmail server queue the qmail-qstat command does show messages in queue, however when an attempt to check what kind of messages are in the queue with qmail-qread no messages are shown, for instance below you see an example of that, even though qmail-qstat claims 2 messages are in the queue, qmail-qread is unable to list the messages:
debian:~# qmail-qread
debian:~#
If all is fine with qmail queue above’s qmail-qread command should have returned something similar to:
debian:~# qmail-qread
26 May 2011 07:46:47 GMT #659982 3517 <hipo@www.pc-freak.net>
remote somemail@gmail.nl
26 May 2011 07:46:47 GMT #659983 3517 <hipo@www.pc-freak.net>
2. Fixing qmail queue manually This is very dangerous initiative, so before you try anything, make sure that you know what you’re doing, the possibility that you make the situation worst if you attempt to tamper manually the qmail queue is quite high 🙂
However if you’re still convinced to try fixing it manually, take a look at /var/qmail/queue it’s very likely that there are permission issues with some of the queued files, in order to fix the situation it’s necessery that the following directories:
/var/qmail/queue/mess/
/var/qmail/queue/remote/
/var/qmail/queue/bounce
/var/qmail/queue/info
gets explored with midnight commander / mc or some kind of convenient file explorer.
If there are queued files owned by users different from qmailq and user group qmail , for instance if owned by the root user, a simple chown qmailq:qmail to the wrong permissions file, should be able to resolve the issues.
Apart from all I explain above, there are many other ways suggested online on howto clean a qmail queue, one very popular one is using James’s qfixq shell script.
This script as of this very date is not working on Debian based systems, the script is dedicated initially to run on Fedora and Redhat based Linuces
Moreover myy experience with qfixq was never successful.
One very important note which is often a cause of many problems, is always make sure you stop and start the qmail server with an interval of at least of 10 seconds.
I’ve managed many servers which after an immediate (undelayed) qmailctl stop and qmailctl start was unable to run the whole engine of the qmail server (and either email sending or email receiving was not properly working) afterwards.
In that cases many weird behaviours are common, consider this seriously if you deal with the qmail-queue, it might happen that even if you have fixed your qmail queue, after a restart the qmail might breaks up.
I’ve experienced this kind of oddities numerous times, thus when I do changes to qmail I always make sure I restart the server a couple of times (at least 5 times 😉 ) always with a good delay between the HUPs.
And as always with qmail prayer is always needed, this server is complex, you never know what will happen next 🙂
