Re: suddenly bounced 15346 mails, what caused it?

On Monday 26 January 2004 20.32, Wietse Venema wrote:
....
> The smtpd process did not read the main.cf file at the exact same
> moment as the trivial-rewrite process (which does the transport
> map lookups).

I see. I was not aware that the different Postfix processes read main.cf
independently of each other. My apologies for not doing my homework and
checking the source. Your (and Victors) analysis of what happened now seems
very plausible to me. It is a relief to know what caused it and that it
should not be able to happen again.

Your patch is a big step forward in that it makes sure the different Postfix
processes read either the old or the new main.cf - not anything in between.

However, as I understand it it does not make sure the different Postfix
processes load the same main.cf. smtpd could still load the old main.cf, and
trivial-rewrite the new.

Maybe this is not a problem (I'm thinking because there might not be any
configuration directives that depend on other processes being configured in a
certain way), or maybe it is still a problem but not something solvable
inside Postfix. It could be argued that the main.cf update process is
responsible for making sure the file on disk does not change while Postfix is
reloaded, but what I'm wondering is if it would not be worth the effort to
make the different Postfix processes check they all load the same
configuration, or do you consider this jumping through too many hoops or
simply impractical to do within Postfix? If I knew how to do this myself, I
would of course be submitting patches instead of mere ideas.

Either way, thank you for the incredible robustness of Postfix and your
continous efforts to make it even better!

/Fredrik