Well That Was Fun

The Big Client had what amounted to an e-mail denial of service attack via massive spam and NDR messages generated by same.  Made worse by recalcitrant software.

For an entirely different problem, the other day I removed and reinstalled the internet mail connector - IMC - for Exchange 5.5.  After doing that, I ran the Exchange Optimizer to have it tell me where it thought things should go on disk, so I could tell it where they really needed to go; namely all on the D drive, not the puny C drive.  And I did.  It ignored me in part.

So today’s problem was disk full.  I deleted 7000-odd queued non-delivery responses from C, ran the optimizer again, convinced it this time, and promptly another 7000-odd needed to be deleted, followed by another 10,000-odd.  CPU usage went crazy.  It hung when I tried to select and delete stuff.  Had to turn off the IMC to delete the queue.  After a reboot I found the flood had stopped.

That led me to look for a way to turn off the automatic NDR feature of Exchange 5.5, locating a hotfix touted by but no longer available from Microsoft, finding the hotfix elsewhere, trying to install it and being yelled at for having a build ending in 50 instead of 53.  Despite having service pack 4 installed as required.  Oh well.

Now perhaps it’ll stay working for a while, despite not having the anti-NDR hotfix…

Posted by on 10/19 at 03:30 PM

Next entry: Happy Birthday

Previous entry: Happy Birthday

<< Back to main