Original problem:
> I'm getting the following errors on my mail servers console during times
> of seemly heavy mail traffic:
>
> Jan 17 01:52:17 mack sendmail[24609]: AG24609: SYSERR: openmailer: pipe (to mailer): Too many open files
> Jan 17 01:52:19 mack sendmail[24609]: AH24609: SYSERR: openmailer: pipe (to mailer): Too many open files
> Jan 17 01:52:20 mack sendmail[24609]: AI24609: SYSERR: openmailer: pipe (to mailer): Too many open files
Solution:
I did two things:
1) Increase MAXUSERS from 8 to 16 - didn't make an immediate
difference but may have had an impact.
2) Before starting sendmail, increase the number of descriptors (in
Csh, 'limit descriptors 256') (Thanks
ups!basil!pauline@fourx.Aus.Sun.COM (Pauline van Winsen) and
stern@sunne.East.Sun.COM (Hal Stern - NE Area Systems Engineer)).
That worked!!
Thanks to the rest of you who responded:
Neil W Rickert <rickert@cs.niu.edu>
chuck-strickland@orl.mmc.com
Brian Dickson <trigraph!briand> (Kudo's for the great idea on using IDA
sendmail - even though it didn't help
with the problem, that will make
maintenance much easier)
Here's the info on IDA sendmail from Brian:
> When we had to do some custom sendmail hacking, and started getting grief from
> Sun's sendmail, we got and installed IDA sendmail. You've never seen anything
> easier to configure, and do weird things with, easily. (Configuration is handled
> by m4 macros, and produces real sendmail.cf files -- but you maintain the m4
> file, not a .cf file.)
> Not only is it a good package, and (relatively) easy to use, it is still
> sendmail, it has source, and is actively maintained, and discussed in the
> group comp.mail.sendmail. I *strongly* recommend this to anyone who is
> doing any significant sendmail hacking.
> (We are a UUCP-only site, so we get stuff from a neighbor -- but you should
> be able to look up this software at your closest FTP source repository. Ask
> archie.)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:07:26 CDT