Hi y'all,

I have a problem and need some help.  I have a very busy mail server which
is on some relatively feeble hardware.  The system is a Pentium 166 with 64
MB of RAM.  It processes under peak load somewhere between 75 and 200 messages
per minute.

It worked fine for quite a while (~1 year) and now, with no software changes on 
the system, I am getting the following message, which I have never heard of:

Mar 21 07:00:54 firewall sendmail[27155]: NOQUEUE: SYSERR(root): opendaemonsocket: cannot bind: Address already in use
Mar 21 07:00:54 firewall sendmail[27155]: problem creating SMTP socket
Mar 21 07:00:54 firewall sendmail[27155]: NOQUEUE: SYSERR(root): opendaemonsocket: server SMTP socket wedged: exiting

Who ever heard of a socket being wedged?  Anyway this error causes the sendmail
daemon to EXIT which shuts off my mail server the instant that happens.  This is
a Very Bad Thing.  I made a cron job which checks once a minute to see if it
is running, and in this case the daemon was restarted 6 seconds later.

HELP!  BTW, the Linux kernel is 2.0.35, and sendmail version 8.9.3 .  Any ideas
or suggestions would be much appreciated.

It is possible, although I am not sure how I would tell, that the system is running
out of filehandles for open files & sockets.  The 2.0.x kernel has a limit of 256
or 1024 or something like that, I forget at the moment.

I have been planning to upgrade this system but I don't want to do it right now,
I want to do it when I'm good and ready.  Help!

--
Jim Ockers (ockers@ockers.net)                     Ask me about Linux!
Contact info: please see http://www.ockers.net/

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