DHCP interferes with inbound email

One of our servers was assigned to accept tens of thousands of emails this evening, so as to retain a backup of another process. We found out too late that it is only accepting about 300 an hour, and at this point, all of the mails are already queued, and are attempting to be delivered to this machine. I will admit that part of my concern is that I am leaving for a four-day trip in a few hours, and do not want to do anything that will suddenly prevent ssh sessions and/or block email flow. Please make certain that your solution does not place these abilities at risk. e.g., Some solutions that I googled suggested simply turning off DHCP. (We're not using dynamic IP's.) While that makes sense, I'm not certain that it's safe. I'm currently a half-hour drive from the server, but soon I will be four hours away. You **must** be available for about an hour between 6am and 9am (East Coast USA) Tuesday so that we can start and complete the project. I'm on a tight schedule, and I need to be able to chat. If you are not available then, please don't bid; thanks. ## Deliverables Despite having 56G free disk space, 2G free memory, and 0.00 load, [login to view URL] seems to somehow be overloaded, at least with respect to inbound email. Even though phl10:/var/mail/d4b *is* steadily growing, it's clear that there's some large problem with the server being able to accept inbound email. Observe: phl5# mailx -v d4b@phl10 Subject: test from 5 to 10 test . EOT phl5# d4b@phl10... Connecting to phl10.note.com. via esmtp... d4b@phl10... Deferred: Connection refused by phl10.note.com. Messages show: Hi. This is the qmail-send program at ns05.untra.com. I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses. This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out. : Sorry, I wasn't able to establish an SMTP connection. (#4.4.1) I'm not going to try again; this message has been in the queue too long. The syslog is showing many errors, all similar to the attached text. About 50 emails will make it into the box, *nothing* will happen for ten minutes, and then the cycle repeats. I have tried rebooting phl10, but this problem does not go away. I'd like a solution. One possible work-around would be to find out what is triggering the sleep/wakeup 10-minute cycle and reduce that to 1 minute, thus allowing us to process 3,000 emails per hour instead of just 300. The server should be able to accept far more than that, but if that's all we can get, it'll do the job. * * *I'm pretty flexible and easy to work with. I tried to make sure that this job is as completely specified as humanly possible. If you have **any** questions, *please* ask them! I have found that it is far better to risk a bit of embarrassment than to spend time working on an assumption which later proves to be wrong. Do not worry that a question may seem silly; just *let me know* and I will be very happy to answer you! | ![][1] | PGP is **not** required for this project. | | ![][2] | An NDA is **not** required for this project. | We will retain full legal rights to the code and/or data upon completion. All code and/or data is and becomes *our* intellectual property! You will *not* have any rights to the code and/or data in any fashion. **Thank you for your consideration and for bidding through RentACoder!** * * *Copyright ? 2006, RentACoder Buyer [notecom][3]. **All Rights Reserved.** Reproduction without permission is strictly prohibited. * * * 1) Complete and fully-functional working program(s) in executable form as well as complete source code of all work done. 2) Deliverables must be in ready-to-run condition, as follows (depending on the nature of the deliverables): a) For web sites or other server-side deliverables intended to only ever exist in one place in the Buyer's environment--Deliverables must be installed by the Seller in ready-to-run condition in the Buyer's environment. b) For all others including desktop software or software the buyer intends to distribute: A software installation package that will install the software in ready-to-run condition on the platform(s) specified in this bid request. 3) All deliverables will be considered "work made for hire" under U.S. Copyright law. Buyer will receive exclusive and complete copyrights to all work purchased. (No GPL, GNU, 3rd party components, etc. unless all copyright ramifications are explained AND AGREED TO by the buyer on the site per the coder's Seller Legal Agreement). ## Platform Linux running exim and apparently DHCP.