System lockup due to "rejecting connections on daemon MTA"

[dylunio]

My gentoo system had been up for a few weeks without any problems, then I came to it this morning to find that the screen had frozen with a time of around 3am. I couldn't access the computer via ssh and the keyboard and mouse were both frozen, so I rebooted. I looked in the /var/log/syslog and I found what the messages were as the computer lockod up:

Sep  3 03:45:23 localhost sm-mta[29207]: rejecting connections on daemon MSA: load average: 23
Sep  3 03:45:38 localhost sm-mta[29207]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 23
Sep  3 03:45:38 localhost sm-mta[29207]: rejecting connections on daemon MSA: load average: 23
Sep  3 03:45:53 localhost sm-mta[29207]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA:  load average: 23

So I'd like to know what the problem was, and maybe how to stop such things happening in the future. I googled and the only thing I found which was to do with sm-mta was in a language I don't understand.

I was at the time using the kernel: linux-2.6.12-gentoo-r4 (im now using linux-2.6.12-gentoo-r9)

Any help would be great;

dylunio

[variant]

sendmail is configured to stop recieving and sending mail at a certain system load.. if you are performing large disk read/writes or somthing at the time this happens then that could be the culprit and the syslog mta messages are a symptom of the high load, not the cause. it could be that somone is trying to exploit a bug in some of your system software.. make sure your version of sendmail and other aplications are fully patched against known exploits. and consider increasing hte verbosity of your firewall logs

[dylunio]

Cheers variant for the explination, since I rarly use sendmail I'll get rid of it for the time being. I'll also check my patches, firewall etc.

[alucard4]

I have exactly the same problem with my Debian Sarge server. When started it runs wonderful, but in some time it gets slow and shows a CPu usage of 100%.

I get exactly the same message in the logs, and i have a lot of "perl" processes running under www-data in the top.

Please, help me. I'm a newbie in linux servers!