Fedora Users — Re: sendmail doesn't respond on heavy disk activity

Alexander Dalloz wrote:

Am Mi, den 16.06.2004 schrieb Marc Lucke um 15:38:

If I use dvdauthor and then telnet to port 25, the port opens but the 
Daemon doesn't answer until dvdauthor is finished.  Since it isn't a cpu 
related but a disk thing, renicing doesn't help.  I think it might be a 
libata thing.  How can I get my system to accept email when I'm using 
dvdauthor or otherwise heavily utilising my drive?


You get no greating message by Sendmail or does it reject your attempt
with a temporary failure message (DSN 4.5.1)?

If its last, then you have a high load and you can adjust that Sendmail
behaviour in the sendmail.mc config file. If it really happens because
of disk activity then you have a really big problem. It would be good to
know whether the system runs FC1 or FC2 and which hardware you use.

Alexander

Hello again Alexander :-)

I have posted several related questions and statements to the list but here goes:

(1) did not have this problem in self compiled kernels > 2.4.24 under FC1. My SATA drive showed as hde and no matter how much I flogged the drive, sendmail would always at least answer.
(2) when doing dvdauthor, my CPU is only running 2 instances of SETI at nice priority 18. I can still even surf via Squid, although it is a bit slower (which I would expect)
(3) running FC2
(4) kernel 2.6.6 was the first Fedora kernel that would even BOOT my machine without manually loading libata at ata_piix in the initrd
(5) have compiled and run-up kernel 2.6.7 from http://www.kernel.org/ copying the fedora kernel config file & some problems I've had have eased somewhat over 2.6.7-pre3 (but that's a different thing). Still sendmail doesn't answer.
(6) I have a gigabyte 8ipe1000 pro2 board with the latest bios version as of about a month ago (F7). My BIOS settings are all set in a very standard way & I have not gone near ctrl-f1 (advanced stuff). It is the 865PE chipset with ich5 architecture. I am using SATA. I have a 2.6GHz hyperthreading P4 and am running the smp version

I think it is a libata thing. I don't know what they did in kernels past 2.4.24 but whatever it was it worked really well with my system. I didn't even see a SATA section in the low-level SCSI drivers section!

I am very happy with FC2. I can wait until the kernel catches up. However if there's any way I can contribute or help myself get back to the "good old" hde days without re-inventing the wheel I'd love to know!

Marc