sendmail creating child processes

[Kevin Wright]

our inbound mail keeps stopping. I can send a message from the command line using sendmail during this state of inoperability. If I stop and restart sendmail, all is good, for a few hours..When I do a Ps and grep for send, I get one sendmail -bd -q15 started by root (parent)and a PID of 62224 and like 10-12 sendmail -bd -q15 with a parent of 62224!!! Sendmail is starting child process???Can anyone help me? thank you.

[Tracey]

looks like someone is issuing that command with the -q15 option - that starts sendmail with the "check/clear queue every 15 minutes" I learned this the hardway too! I killed all of the -q15 processes and then stopped and started sendmail again using :
/sbin/init.d/sendmail stop
/sbin/init.d/sendmail start

[Douglas Cromby_1]

This sounds alright on the face of it. The parent sendmail process will spawn other sendmail processes at it sees fit.

If you type mailq, you should see a "*" against the message being processed. It could be that a large message has given the impression that things have stopped.

You can use mailq to determine whether the messages are being processed. Also messages will queue up in:

/var/spool/mqueue

and are in pairs of qf and df files. So you can monitor these files to see anything is being processed.

Finally, to see if there are any errors, check /var/adm/syslog/mail.log. This should log the processing of messages, and will give an indication of what is happening.