[PLUG] postfix going wild

[MaD dUCK <madduck@madduck.net>]

hey, this is a cry out for help to you postfix maniacs...

situation is this: i had postfix happily running on my site before i
installed the debian package for mailman and played around with it for
a while.

suddenly i started that postfix's mailq was filled up with entries
destined for local users. any remote mail immediately got sent, but
local mail froze in the queue. furthermore, this is the relevant parts
of the ps -Aef output:

root       505     1  0 22:11 ?        00:00:00 /usr/lib/postfix/master
postfix    506   505  0 22:11 ?        00:00:00 pickup -l -t fifo
postfix    507   505  0 22:11 ?        00:00:00 qmgr -l -t fifo -u
postfix    511   505  0 22:11 ?        00:00:00 local -t unix
postfix    512   505  0 22:11 ?        00:00:00 local -t unix
postfix    513   505  0 22:11 ?        00:00:00 local -t unix
...
postfix    562   505  0 22:11 ?        00:00:00 local -t unix
postfix   1007   505  0 22:26 ?        00:00:00 showq -t unix -u
madduck   1085   994  0 22:28 pts/1    00:00:00 grep postfix

replace the ellipses with enough local -t unix entries such that the
total is precisely 50 - my default-process-limit

so the scenario i get is that something is continuously spawning as
many local processes as it can, preventing the actual mail in the
local queue to be delivered.

my question is why??? the only way mailman interacts with postfix is
via /usr/sbin/sendmail and /etc/aliases, and the problem persists even
if i remove every reference to mailman out of /etc/aliases and then
postalias the file again.

i ran postfix chroot-jailed but set it free for now to see if that was
the problem, but it wasn't. the logs show nothing except for letting
me know that the queue entries are all part of the active queue
whenever i do a 'postfix flush'.

have you seen this before?
or any idea???

i am clueless!
martin

[greetings from the heart of the sun]# echo madduck@!#:1:s@\@@@.net
-- 
please keep your hands off the secretary's reproducing equipment.


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