Re: unable to fork

["Karsten M. Self" <kmself@ix.netcom.com>]

on Tue, Dec 03, 2002 at 11:12:46AM -0000, Mikael Jirari (Mikael@eits.info) wrote:
> Hi I'm trying qmail-scanner and I got this message in my syslog
> 
> X-Qmail-Scanner-1.15: [mailsvr103891358642412441] Unable to fork
> /var/qmail/bin (#4.3.0) - Permission denied
> X-Qmail-Scanner-1.15: [mailsvr103891358642412441] Unable to queue message
> (111). (#4.3.0) - Illegal seek
> 
> 
> Ls -al gives
> -rwsr-xr-x    1 qmailq   qmail       57730 Dec  3 10:57
> /var/qmail/bin/qmail-scanner-queue.pl
> drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root         8192 Dec  3 10:57 /var/qmail/bin
> 
> What does it exactly means ?
> I know a little bit what fork means but I can't see the problem
> How could I resolve that ?

The "Unable to fork" usually means you've run out of system resources,
generally memory, file handles, or process table entries.  You'll want
to :

   - Check memory:  free
   - Check filehandles:  lsof | wc -l
   - Check processes:  ps aux | wc -l; ps ux | wc -l

...generally, user processes are limited to ~256 (check me on this, I'm
not positive).

I'm not sure what the "Illegal seek" message is coming from, Google that
w/ 'qmail-scanner' as a related term.

Peace.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com>        http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
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