Autoturn Problem

[#1]

Quote from: Crucibleofevil

You access the internet with your root account?

No, not usually, I'd been on doing a lot of config work so I'd done a sudo -i because otherwise I would have gone mad typing sudo vi /etc/mysql/my.cnf  followed by sudo /etc/init.d/mysql restart and so on, and I was in the tmp directory checking out the tail of the php_errors file

[#2]

Turns out it was as I expected and it's the load on the servers that's to blame. Looks like we're going to need to contact a few users whose domains are hammering the servers.

[#3]

Thanks for that Bob,
I rarely use autoturn, I only use it before and after a server bounce or if I've been off line for any length of time, but it sounds like some people are fingering the autoturn servers on a very regular basis.

[#4]

It's more the spam destined for these problematic domains that's the problem as opposed to legitimate finger requests from the customers in question.

[#5]

Ahh, I guess I'm lucky that I maybe now get 1 or 2 bits of spam a week now.

[#6]

Quote

I've raised this with our network team. apparently the connections to our autoturn servers are maxing out at port 79. we will monitor this for the next few days and if the issue persists we might have to re-adjust this through our loadbalancing system

Well I guess its better late than never.
How a question raised at 09:28 on Saturday can take until 5pm on Tuesday to get that response I do not know, and I still don't understand what "changes" they made to my account to "fix" the problem (or what they claimed would fix the problem).
I know that CS people cannot be technical gurus but I do not like being basically fobbed off with "fake" answers which is what I was given over the weekend. Why it took until today for someone to talk to the network team I do not know.

[#7]

The Net-Ops guys don't work over the weekend Steve. Even so, I'm sorry it took so long to get the answer you were looking for
It turns out that the autoturn servers have a maximum overall limit of 500 connections per server. This restriction is shared between SMTP (port 25) and finger (port 79). Because of how busy the servers get, the SMTP connections have been saturating all the available connections resulting in customers getting connection timeouts when trying to connect to dequeue their mail.
We're about to tweak some of these settings so hopefully you'll start to notice an improvement...