[ale] Sendmail problem update!

[Dave Ritchie]

charlie wrote:
 
> One of my friends suggested just reinstalling.  He says that there is something
> terribly wrong with my machine, and the best way is just to start over.  I'm
> not so sure if I want to commit to this, but if I must I must.  So before I
> commit linux suicide does anybody have any ideas!!  I probably won't be able to
> do this for a couple of weeks or until everything stops happenning so fast! :)
> 
> thanks
> charlie
> 
>                                                                 Charles Hubbard
>                                           Internet: charlie at felix.cc.gatech.edu
> We have to believe in our free will: We have no choice in the matter.

This is largely speaking from HP-UX experience, so some differences
may occur in the Linux environment. I would recommend that this be done
from a terminal, and not from a network session. 

  I would suggest running a shell with a higher than normal priority
so that it will always execute first on the run queue. This is 
typically done by a command of the form:

   nice --10 sh

Assuming that you have top on the machine, you should be also able to
run this with a negative nice value and see what is killing your machine
and then deal with the problem. If it is the X server, you may need to
rebuild X with symbolic debug turned on so that you send a kill signal
to the server and read the resulting core file so that you can determine
why the server is looping....

   Another stupid Unix trick from.....

-- Dave Ritchie
der at atl.hp.com