[rt-users] incoming mail lost after possible httpd crash

[Jesse Vincent]

> today we almost lost an incoming e-mail that was processed by rt-mailgate 
> but never appeared in RT as a ticket. The only thing I can see in the web 
> server logs around the time of the event is the following line:
> 
> [Fri Oct 23 08:41:31 2009] [notice] child pid 21284 exit signal Segmentation 
> fault (11)
> 
> So it looks like the Apache process crashed, and the ticket was never 
> created. We only noticed because we copy all mail to another mailbox for 
> manual inspection.
> 
> Now my questions:
> 
> * How can I avoid future web server crashes, or at least get better 
> diagnostics when it happens?

That's a segfault inside apache. Dealing with apache segfaults is...not
really RT specific. One option here is to switch to fastcgi. If RT is
making Perl crash, that's much more "our problem" and much easier for us
to track down and fix.

> * Can rt-mailgate be configured not to drop the mail on the floor if the 
> reception fails? I would like the mail delivery to be retried by the mail 
> system.

..it should already be doing this.  rt-mailgate only tells your MTA that
it has dealt successfully with a message after the server comes back and
says that it's written the message into the database.  Otherwise, it
will tell the MTA "tempfail" and the MTA will try again. 


> System details: RT 3.8.5 installed from the Debian package (request-
> tracker3.8 3.8.5-1), Debian amd64, 4 GB RAM, Apache 2.2.9-10+lenny4 with 
> prefork mpm and mod-perl2 2.0.4.
>

Best,
Jesse