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Re: zmailer scheduler problems (Lai Yiu Fai's report)
Hello,
Is there any temporary workaround for the SMTP transport agent problem?
Our site found substantial problem with that. I have already removed
all "gangschedule" option in scheduler.conf but it doesn't help.
I don't mind for any performance issue if every SMTP transport is only
for one mail transaction. But I concern much about the correctness.
Or hope 2.99.16 will sooner release to fix this problem. :(
=======================================================================
Lai Yiu Fai | Tel.: (852) 2358-6202
Centre of Computing Services | Fax.: (852) 2358-0967
& Telecommunications | E-mail: ccyflai@uxmail.ust.hk
|
The Hong Kong University of | Clear Water Bay,
Science & Technology | Kowloon, Hong Kong.
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>
> Hello,
>
> As I suspected, it was SMTP transport agent problem, but to
> be able to debug it, I had to make a set of spool-files for
> testing the phenomena, and then place debugger into the smtp
> transporter while feeding jobs to it manually.
>
> Problem turned out to be in main(), where there is a loop
> starting with printf("#hungry\n"), continuing with ctlopen(),
> and then if the target host has changed (or was not opened
> before) closure of old connection, and opening of a new one.
>
> The handling continues with process(), which takes smtpstatus
> as one of its inputs, but in case of sending to same host, the
> re-open does not happen, and the variable contains status of
> the PREVIOUS message... And because it was failure to begin
> with, process() thinks it failed too, and ALL messages after
> the one that failed, became failures.
>
> Now the status variable is reset before the optional connection
> open is done, and thus has sensible value in connection optimization
> case, and won't cause process() to puke on delivery attempt...
>
> It was a hairy one.
>
> I have also been tinkering with "MIME-2", that is, mechanisms
> to add translations of 8-bit chars in email headers to "MIME-2"
> encoded words.
>
> Because the system has no knowledge of what charsets user is using,
> I decided to create coded words of style:
>
> =?UNKNOWN-8BIT?Q?=E4=E4kk=F6=stesti?=
>
> (That is computer slang word in Finnish, when coded in ISO-8859-1,
> but because the transport is not in direct contact with user,
> this "UNKNOWN-8BIT" is the best approximation of a charset..
> I am trying to think a way to make guesses in LOCAL environment,
> by storing the value of LC_CTYPE variable, but the string in there
> appears to vary in between systems :-/ )
>
> This stuff is now on SMTP transporter, because there are servers
> out there that reject the messages right away, when there are 8-bit
> characters in headers (like in personal names!), like this:
>
> From: Manu =?ISO-8859-1?Q?M=E4h=F6nen?=
> <Listserv.Maintenance@fiport.funet.fi>
>
> In fact this is an alteration of a scheme I made for SMTP-receiver,
> where I decided that rejecting a message because it has 8-bit chars
> in headers is a bit drastic, and now the smtpserver does this
> "coded words" conversion on input. (Certainly not as good one as
> it should be..)
>
>
> YOUR OPINION SOUGHT:
> Right now that "MIME-2" processing is involuntary,
> that is, there is NO option to disable it.
>
> Should there be something, and if yes, what ?
>
> A thing that is likely to survive is to send "Subject:"
> in plain 8-bit, but if we feed personal names in coded
> words, and receiver handles them, is there any need ?
>
> Also, If we can get something like LC_CTYPE from user
> via /usr/lib/sendmail into mailer's knowledge, how
> should the knowledge be used ? I would get from there
> instead of "UNKNOWN-8BIT", either "iso_8859_1" (Linux, Sunos),
> or "fi_FI.ISO8859-1" (OSF/1), neither of which are valid
> charsets in the sense of MIME specs..
>
> /Matti Aarnio <mea@nic.funet.fi>
>
> PS: USA-NORDUnet 34 Mbps link should go via PTAT-1, but that cable
> has now TWO faults in it, and two cable-ships repairing it.
> Backup routing via satellite is also down, and we are down to
> "mere" 2x H12 connection (H12 is a "hyper channel" set of 31
> out of 32 timeslots on 2Mbps PCM link)
>
> PS2: The new scheduler evolves radically, the source you see in
> 2.99.16 is fading away rapidly, as the new thread scheduling
> system builds up, and eats away globs of old code :-)
>