Earlier today, I posted two messages to the list, one about sendmail
hanging on outgoing mail at the 'DATA' stage, the other about
'babble' messages on my Sun3 console.
It turns out that both were in fact related. I've received several
replies. Thanks to those listed below and to those who may yet
respond.
Brendan Kehoe <brendan@cs.widener.edu>
Neil W Rickert <rickert@cs.niu.edu>
milt@pe-nelson.com
Nick Cuccia <cuccia@eris.berkeley.edu>
Neil's message suggested a hardware problem, and this set me off
in the right direction. I had my maintenance vendor all set to
swap the Sun's ethernet board, when their rep suggested that he'd
first like to remove the Hewlitt Packard "LanProbe" device he'd
installed on the segment, just this week. The LanProbe is a
network-mapping system, which reads network traffic on a segment,
measures distance between hosts, and allows you to draw pretty
pictures of the segment, with all its hosts.
Removing the LanProbe did in fact do the trick, and all my queued
mail has gone. It appears that the LanProbe was sending Ethernet-
sized packets (or trying to) down our dial-up PPP Internet
link (our gateway--the one with the babble errors--is on
the same segment) in an effort to draw a map of the Internet!
--
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