Re: Milter to error state observation

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Sep 09), Bob Falkenberg said:
> Observation
> New software Dev Group here is writing can easily swamp DNS server
> with massive numbers of queries.  As the DNS server gets bogged down
> it takes longer and longer to respond and finally causes server to
> stop responding... DNS admin had been trying to balance the load and
> started using the same server that SA was using to do internal DNS
> lookups.  DNS server bogs down SA starts throwing milter errors. 
> Admin restarts DNS sever and milter errors stop..... Server bogs down
> again... Milter errors return.....

You can mitigate this a bit by lowering spamassassin's DNS timeouts in
your local.cf file.  The default value for rbl_timeout is 30 seconds,
for example, which could easily be lowered to 10, possibly 5.  That
will let spamssassin complete its checks before sendmail gives up on
the milter.  Also, you can set "dns_available yes" to skip some test
probes spamassassin runs.  Amd last, remember to zero out the osirusoft
RBL tests because they are no longer active:

score RCVD_IN_OSIRUSOFT_COM     0
score X_OSIRU_DUL               0
score X_OSIRU_DUL_FH            0
score X_OSIRU_OPEN_RELAY        0
score X_OSIRU_SPAM_SRC          0
score X_OSIRU_SPAMWARE_SITE     0

-- 
        Dan Nelson
        address@hidden