Hi List,
today we had an outage of our internet provider. The connection was broken
for several hours during which the mail server of the internet provider
stored our e-mails. Now after the connection is established again these
mails are sent to our own mail server from the provider's server at a
pretty high rate.
Our system is SuSE 9.2 with Postfix 2.1.5 as the SMTP server and the
SUSEfirewall which comes with 9.2. All current patches are applied.
The problem now is that after a small number of mails from our provider the
SMTP server does not accept any more connections. Instead it complains
about timeouts, lost connections or SMTP EOFs. When telnetting to the
server in this state a connection is made but there is no prompt "220
<servername> ESMT Postfix". The only way to fix this I found up to now is
restarting Postfix (the cron job does it now every 3 minutes...) but that
is only a very crude fix. Even setting the max_use parameter in main.cf to
1 to get a new smtpd for each connection does not help. Has anybody an
idea what is causing this behaviour? Is it the firewall or is it Postfix
or anything else who is limiting the connections? There are some firewall
errors in the logs, but not nearly as many as the lost connections of the
SMTP server:
Mar 17 21:52:18 pluto kernel: SFW2-OUT-ERROR IN= OUT=dsl0 SRC=<our IP>
DST=