Linux uuencode & mailx

[mtt1966]

Hello I was wondering if anyone has come across this problem before.

We were running a box using Solaris and we were emailing reports out using mailx and uuencode with a fairly high success rate of attachments attaching.

However, since we have changed servers which runs Red Hat Linux the emails have become totally random, some do not send and a large proportion of them do not attach the attachment.

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance
mtt1966

[DaveLembke]

What Server OS were you running prior to Red Hat?

Just wondering if you kept with similar OS lineage or made a drastic change to Red Hat from a totally different Linux Server line. Such as going from Xandros to Red Hat which is not a clean move vs from CentOS to Red Hat which is of the same lineage.

The scripts that were run at the prior server that are acting up at teh Red Hat servers likely need corrections. Hopefully there is logging in the scripts so that problems are easier to detect and correct.

As far as emails becoming totally Random..... I'd think there there would be a similarity in the e-mail that fail to attach or send, so I would look at those that dont go across to see if there is a common attribute among them that stands out as the relationship as to why they are giving the Red Hat Servers troubles when attempting to send them. However that is not to completely rule out random from the equation, but its more common for there to be a problem with the e-mail that causes it not to send when generated or processed through scripts than it to be random. However if the script is malfunctioning such as with a flaw, memory leak, etc this can happen as well as if the servers themselves have something going on with a bad memory stick in one of them etc, it could puke on this routine and not crash the system. So you may want to run like memtest86 on this server to make sure that all is well.

[mtt1966]

Hi Dave, thanks for your reply.

I will need to investigate some of the issues you raise when I get back in the office.

One thing I will say is that when I say the attachments randomly drop off, it is random, as I can run the script from the shell and the email will arrive with the attachment, then run the same script for the same attachment moments later and the attachment is not there.

Very frustrating, perhaps, and this is why I changed my status from Experienced to Familiar, you can tell me if there are any logs I can look at that register when this happens?

Many Thanks
mtt1966

 

[DaveLembke]

I'd run a memory test on the server given the randomness of this issue. It sounds like either memory related or a bug with the distro and whatever is being run. Sometimes running scripts that are in legacy scripting with more modern servers, you can run into issues with legacy supportted script instructions being bugged.

As far as logs go, the person who created the script would be able to echo out or write information to a log file to track the scripts progress and any error conditions which may be set to ignore ( silent mode ) displaying could be displayed to the log file.