Bug#342619: Possible exim retry bug (Re: master mail problems -- help needed)

[Marc Haber]

tags #342619 help moreinfo
thanks

On Fri, Dec 09, 2005 at 01:12:56AM +0100, Jeroen van Wolffelaar wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 08, 2005 at 10:33:54PM +0100, Florian Weimer wrote:
> > * Lionel Elie Mamane:
> > 
> > > On Thu, Dec 08, 2005 at 09:30:52PM +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> > >
> > >> The fact that my primary MX is only available through IPv6, and that
> > >> this is the case for other people who're having problems too might
> > >> then be a better chance at being the problem.
> > >
> > > My primary MX is IPv6-only, too. I don't have detected a problem yet :)
> > 
> > Do you receive lots of mail from master.debian.org, and would you
> > notice the bounces?  Mail from Debian mailing lists come directly from
> > murphy.debian.org, which does not seem to have the problem.
> > 
> > You also have one IPv4-only MX, which might be enough to prevent the
> > Exim bug[1] from occurring.
> > 
> > [1] I'm not sure if it's a Exim's fault, it's only a hunch.
> 
> I'm quite sure it's an exim bug, but haven't quite nailed it yet. The
> bug has been witnessed positively both on master.d.o and on
> one mailserver I maintain. Interestingly, it doesn't seem to be IPv6
> related (or maybe there are two bugs).

I have monitored Florian Weimer's attempts to debug. The main stopper
seems to be that it is extremely hard to get ahold of Master's logs.

> The situation on my mailserver was that the primary MX had a long term
> unavailability and was way past cutoff time, but the secondary MX worked
> fine. However, for some reason, what suddenly happened was that all the
> mail queued for the domain in question got bounced for reason of having
> a extended time of being unreacheable, past the retry time. Obviously,
> that's bogus, as the secundary MX wasn't past cutoff yet.

If you experience this for the next time, I'd like to see the output
of exinext $DOMAIN.

> I think this is a serious bug, as it can cause mail to get lost
> (bouncing a mail for no good reason at all in some very common
> situations like the IPv6 vs IPv4 multimhomed MX's)

Agreed. But since the bug doesn't happen for me, I need cooperation -
either yours or DSA's to be able to Debug on master.

Greetings
Marc

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